Possible Reason Why AEW Will Never Compete with WWE Raw on Mondays

This week, AEW witness another major dip in its viewership, losing to NXT 795,000 to 683,000. Based on last week’s deadlock, NXT was able to gain 17,000 viewers, but AEW lost 95,000 viewers. One of the biggest selling points of NXT was the main event match of Shayna Baszler defending her NXT Women’s Championship against Rhea Ripley.

The conclusion of the NXT main event was Ripley ending Baszler’s title reign of over 400 days, winning the NXT Women’s Championship for the first time. AEW’s main event was an AEW World Tag Team Championship match between SCU and The Young Bucks, which SCU was able to successfully retain the titles.

After weeks of dominance from AEW, NXT is gaining a great deal of momentum in the television rivalry. Based on this week’s numbers, fans were much more interested overall in the NXT product than AEW. This begs the question of whether AEW would ever be willing to compete against WWE’s flagship show, Monday Night Raw.

According to Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer, this answer is “never.”

Since money is now a problem for AEW, a Twitter user asked whether the company did not pick Mondays to air their Dynamite TV program, which would have resurrected the Monday Night Wars.

Meltzer responded, “They will NEVER go against the NFL, so that means no Monday, Sunday or Thursday.”

So, based on this comment, it seems as if WWE was not the primary reason why AEW did not choose Mondays to air their weekly shows. Instead, it was due to the National Football League. To put things even further in perspective, Monday Night Football garnered over 11 million views this week.

If AEW were to air on Mondays, based on their current numbers, they would heavily trail WWE Raw. In comparison to AEW, Raw did over 2.2 million views in the first hour, nearly 2.1 in the second hour, and over 1.8 in the third hour.

Follow Chris Featherstone @chrisprolific and the Pancakes and Powerslams Show @cravewrestling and the Crave Wrestling YouTube page.