The final episode of Monday Night Raw before WrestleMania 37 matched last week's viewership.
According to Showbuzz Daily (h/t Marc Middleton of WrestlingInc.com), the go-home WrestleMania 37 episode averaged 1.701 million viewers on the USA Network for the second straight week. This is the lowest viewership for Raw in 2021.
Last year's WrestleMania g0-home episode of Raw performed much better with 1.924 million viewers. However, that number also marked the show's lowest viewership of 2020 at the time.
Of course, WWE had serious competition on Monday with the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship Game between the Baylor Bears and Gonzaga Bulldogs.
This week's show was entirely focused on the buildup for WrestleMania. Drew McIntyre defeated King Corbin in the main event, one week after the latter brutally attacked him.
The WrestleMania go-home show marked just the third episode of Raw in 2021 that fell under 1.8 million viewers; the Feb. 8 edition of Raw drew only 1.715 million viewers (per WrestlingInc.com's viewership tracker).
The Jan. 4 "Legends Night" show marks the most-watched Raw episode of 2021, having garnered 2.128 million viewers. No other episode has reached two million viewers this year.
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Meanwhile, SmackDown is consistently reaching over two million viewers. The show has only fallen below that mark once in the new year (the Feb. 12 episode reached 1.990 million viewers).
Nothing To Worry About
As noted earlier, WWE had to compete with the NCAA basketball final. The ratings in 2021 have been stronger compared to the final months of 2020, so the decline in viewership over the last two weeks isn't a cause for concern. Things should pick up after WrestleMania and before the Money in the Bank pay-per-view.
Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter recently reported that Vince McMahon believes "television ratings don’t mean what they used to." It's true to a certain extent. The company has massive followings on its social media pages and YouTube channel, after all. So if the WWE chairman isn't fully concerned about ratings, nobody in the company should be at this time.
