WWE SmackDown ratings down coming off Survivor Series

SmackDown averaged 2.15 million viewers Tuesday night, down eight percent from last week.

The show retained the usual percentage of Raw viewers from the night before, so last week’s relatively high number was clearly an anomaly due to the curiosity surrounding the injury to Becky Lynch.

SmackDown did have sports competition in the form of college basketball on ESPN, which aired directly opposite the episode and averaged 2.167 million viewers. SmackDown finished seventh for the night on cable in terms of total viewers and fell to second in the 18-49 demo with a 0.69 rating, trailing only the basketball game, which did a 0.79.

Year-over-year, SmackDown was down nearly 20 percent from the post-Survivor Series episode in 2017, continuing the recent trend of declines that was only stopped with SmackDown 1000.

Many of the network TV shows that run on Tuesday nights will have winter breaks coming up, so there may be an artificial increase in SmackDown ratings leading into the holiday season — but that will be offset by the fact that SmackDown numbers will almost certainly be way down when they have to run on both Christmas and New Year’s Day this year.

Here’s a look at the last 10 weeks of SmackDown ratings and how they compare to the same week in 2017: