When Draft Day has been your football team’s de facto Super Bowl Sunday for more than a decade, stratospheric television ratings shouldn’t be a surprise.
ESPN released its overnight ratings from its first night of coverage for the NFL Draft and the Northeast Ohio market proved to be the top one for viewership, according to numbers from Nielsen, a ratings measuring service.
The network averaged a 5.1 for the night. That didn’t approach the lofty numbers from last year’s annual players’ supermarket, which had plenty of drama courtesy of the presence of Johnny Manziel, who eventually ended up in Cleveland.