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What's the Story?
Unlike the Michigan State Wolverines, WWE managed to keep their momentum from March with minimal losses in viewership.
The April 2, 2018 edition of Monday Night Raw averaged 3.358 million viewers and was down slightly against last week's average of 3.367 million.
In case you didn't know
Triple H and Stephanie McMahon's Q&A with Kurt Angle & Ronda Rousey kicked off the program and was the biggest segment in the first hour. Other notable segments throughout the show were John Cena addressing The Undertaker and Roman Reigns and Brock Lesnar's confrontation.
The biggest match on the show was Finn Bálor vs Seth Rollins with segments and video packages dominating the majority of TV time.
The heart of the matter
The following is the hourly breakdown for this week's edition of Raw per ShowBuzzDaily:
Hour 1: 3.430 million
Hour 2: 3.329 million
Hour 3: 3.314 million
Raw has dominated cable for the majority of the year but was knocked off the mountain this week by the NCAA Championship Game between the Michigan State Wolverines and the Villanova Wildcats.
The game was available across cable networks, TNT, TBS and TruTV, in addition to online streaming and the dominance of the Wildcats clearly held the attention of the sports world with 13+ million viewers.
The game started in 20 minutes into the second hour which led to the 101,000 viewership decrease in the second hour. The game lasted into the third hour also leading to a small drop of 15,000 viewers - one of the smallest viewership drops in the history of the three-hour Raw era.
In addition to their viewership dip, Raw managed to rise above the 2017 pre-WrestleMania episode. However, this year's average was still relatively low compared to the past few years
The following is the viewership average for every pre-WrestleMania Raw since 2014:
March 24, 2014 - 4.323 million
March 23, 2015 - 4.187 million
March 28,2016 - 3.764 million
March 27,2017 - 3.292 million
April 2, 2018 - 3.358 million
What's next?
The Raw after WrestleMania has a historic increase in ratings and viewership on a massive scale, but there has been a significant decline in the viewership boost for the post-WrestleMania episode over the years.
The increase will be expected with no competition in the ratings, but the most interesting factor will be how the April 9, 2018 edition compares to other post-WrestleMania episodes.
Author's take
WrestleMania 34 looks like an awesome show in the works and the excitement is slowly creeping up.
Whether that excitement will translate into improved viewership remains to be seen.
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