Raw will be facing an uphill battle over the next five months as football season is back and Monday Night Football on ESPN returns tonight.

Historically, Raw always takes a big hit in viewership starting in September as more fans opt to watch NFL live rather than WWE. WWE will be testing a new start time for Raw from next week for three weeks in a row, starting an hour earlier at 7PM ET.

Last year, Raw drew 1,430,000 viewers head-to-head with the first MNF broadcast on ESPN on September 9. That was a 225,000-viewer drop from the previous week. In 2023 it was even worse with Raw drawing 1,353,000 viewers in its first broadcast against MNF, down 351,000 viewers from the prior week.

With Netflix viewership, “ratings” will be calculated differently as the way Netflix counts viewers is different from the way Nielsen calculates them for cable and network, so it will be impossible to compare the drop this year compared to previous years.

Raw has been in the top 10 global Netflix charts weekly since it started on January 6 and it could be that the return of Monday Night Football ends that streak.