The network did not provide a breakdown of how many viewers watched on each platform. Measured against last season, the audience rose about 5 percent from the Week 1 average of 22.1 million viewers, and the combined figure ranks as the third-most watched Monday night game on record for the network.
Care is needed when placing that ranking in historical context, because current ratings counts include out-of-home viewers who were not tracked in earlier eras, which can inflate apparent gains versus older broadcasts. Still, the raw increase year over year suggests modest growth for the season opener.
Pre-game programming also ticked up. Monday Night Countdown drew 1.9 million viewers, a 7 percent increase from the Week 1 audience a year ago, despite now airing across both NFL Network and ESPN. That relatively small rise in the pregame audience highlights how much of the overall viewership is concentrated in the game telecasts themselves.
With no platform-level figures available, the split between linear television and streaming remains unclear. The consolidated total stands as the headline metric for now, marking a successful launch to the Monday night schedule and giving ESPN a stronger start to the season compared with last year.
