Even with the teams entering the game at a combined 4-8, an NFC East battle between the Cowboys and Eagles delivered.
Per ESPN, 18.8 million viewers watched the Week 7 Monday night game between Dallas and Philadelphia.
Keeping with a recent trend, ESPN announced that more than one million watched alt casts on ESPN2 and NFL Network, without specifying the audiences for the ManningCast and the Next Gen Stats production.
The NFL event had competition in the form of Game 3 of the World Series, on Fox. Fox has yet to announce the viewership for Game 3. (Usually, silence from a network means there’s nothing special about the numbers.)
On Friday and Saturday, Game 1 and Game 2 drew 12.259 million viewers and 10.854 million viewers, respectively.
Once upon a time, the NFL avoided head-to-head competition with the World Series. In the late ‘70s, the NFL moved the Monday night game that conflicted with the World Series to the prior Thursday night. Through 2009, the NFL avoided the first Sunday night of the World Series.
In 2010, the NFL decided to take over; the World Series now plays Game 1 and Game 2 on Friday and Saturday. The smartest move for baseball would be to avoid Sunday, Monday, and Thursday when scheduling the World Series.
