The Tuesday, February 28th editon of WWE SmackDown averaged 2.566 million viewers, down 8% from last week’s impressive number.
The second hour of the show went up against U.S. President Donald Trump’s address to Congress which had 43 million viewers.
The show retained just over 83% of the Raw audience from the night before, matching the 2017 average. Last week’s show did the third-best viewership number since the July 2016 brand split.
With all of the coverage by cable news networks of the speech, SmackDown didn’t crack the top 10 in overall cable viewers. Instead, they were 7th for the night in the 18-49 demo with a 0.86 ratings but ahead of all non-speech coverage.
The main event was Luke Harper vs. AJ Styles to determine the SmackDown world title challenger at WrestleMania and closed with a memorable angle featuring Randy Orton burning down the Wyatt Compound.
Here is a look at the Smackdown ratings so far in 2017 as compared to the RAW ratings the same week: