Mad Dog Smoking Francesa In The TV Ratings With His New Show
Awful Announcing – Longtime fans of Russo and Francesa might wonder which one is winning the duel at the moment and drawing a larger audience. Thankfully, we now have the data to answer that question. In its first week on MLB Network, High Heat with Christopher Russo averaged 83,600 viewers from March 31-April 4, hitting a high total of 112,000 viewers last Tuesday. In its first week on Fox Sports 1 (March 24-28), The Mike Francesa Show averaged a mere 29,250 viewers from Monday-Thursday. Francesa’s high during his debut week was just 32,000 viewers on Fox Sports 1. On Fox Sports 2, Francesa’s peak viewership during his debut week was 20,000 viewers. The lack of distribution on FS2 has been a sore spot for Francesa and his legions of fans already, as has his preemption on FS1 for Champions League soccer. The comparison isn’t quite apples to apples. Francesa goes for 3 hours on Fox Sports 1 and Dog is only on the air for 1. Russo hosts an MLB talk show on MLB Network and has a built-in audience. Francesa is hosting a New York talk show for a national audience. And of course, if you included radio numbers it would be a different story. However, even with those factors in mind, Russo is almost tripling Francesa in terms of average television viewership, making it a blowout victory in his favor.
How bout that! Mad Dog doing work on his new MLB Network gig. The Awful Announcing guys are right though – you can’t really compare the two. Mike’s “TV show” is just a simulcast of him sitting there doing radio where as Dog’s show is an actual television program. Still great to see Russo doing well though. I wouldn’t say Mad Dog is “back” because he really never left. But as a guy who never listened to satellite radio it feels like he kinda disappeared. He does fine with Sirius but I like seeing him back on TV.
Mike on Fox Sports has been a disaster so far. I fucking hate when they switch over to Fox Sports 2. All the sudden NASCAR is on my TV at 4pm and I dont know what happened. And they have all these preexisting agreements with soccer and other shows that have prempted his show for the past few weeks. I guess once those all run out it will be smooth sailing and its better than no TV at all but its been pretty shitty.
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But the point here is that High Heat is a pretty legit show if you want to get your Mad Dog fix, and the ratings seem to back it up.