Berchelt vs Valdez does strong rating for ESPN, main event peaks at 960K

Last Saturday night’s edition of Top Rank Boxing on ESPN, headlined by Oscar Valdez’s masterful upset win over Miguel Berchelt, came in fourth for the night on cable, averaging 771,000 viewers for the broadcast, with the main event itself averaging 895K and peaking at 960K, according to Nielsen.

The fight also did solid numbers in the key demographics, and none of this accounts for how many people may have watched the fight streaming on ESPN+, where it was also available.

Top Rank and ESPN should be pretty happy with these numbers overall, as they did also have some competition, for what it was worth.

As Wil mentioned yesterday, Adrien Broner’s comeback on Showtime, which ran head-to-head for all it matters, averaged 288K for the main event. And without just repeating myself entirely from a comment on that post, I will say here that Broner doing 288K with a far better fight head-to-head on ESPN is actually — perhaps rather unfortunately — pretty good for Showtime right now. Benavidez-Angulo did 188K last August. Lubin-Gausha did 150K in September. Colbert-Arboleda did 163K in December.