by Rick Scaia
Exclusive to OnlineOnslaught.com

[Note from the present day: it was an annual tradition, first at WrestleManiacs and then at WrestleLine, for me to publish a RAW vs. Nitro retrospective every September to commemorate the start of the Monday Night Wars on September 4, 1995.  Then, WCW went out of business in 2001, and the tradition died.  But here, on our usual sanctioned "OOld School" day, we're gonna go back and revive it!

My detailed final edition of the the Monday Night Wars feature will be published in serial fashion over the next few Thursdays.  The publication schedule means that the final parts will be posted here at OO on Thursday, September 4: the exact 8 year anniversary of the beginning of the RAW vs. Nitro battle!

I've been meaning for almost two years now to publish this feature at OO, and having a weekly throwback column has finally motivated me to dust it off, reformat it, and present it here for posterity.  It has been polished and corrected a bit since 2001 -- most references should be current, though I refused to change "WWF" to "WWE" at any point along the way -- and should stand as my "final word" on the Monday wars.  Enjoy.]

RAW vs. Nitro: Looking at the Big Picture 
September 4,1995 - March 26, 2001... AND BEYOND!

OVERALL MONDAY NIGHT WAR SNAPSHOT 
Click Here for Overall Head-to-Head Ratings Chart
Head to Head Battles: 253 
Nitro Wins: 106 
RAW Wins: 144 
Draws: 3 
Nitro Average Rating: 3.38 
(Cllick Here for Nitro's Ratings Chart) 
RAW Average Rating: 4.29 
(Click Here for RAW's Ratings Chart) 
Combined Average Rating:  7.67
Unopposed Nights: 38 (Twenty for RAW, eighteen for Nitro) 
Highest Head to Head Rating: 7.4 for RAW (on May 1, 2000) 
Largest Margin of Victory: 5.0 points for RAW (on May 1, 2000) 
Longest Winning Streak: 114 weeks for RAW (spanning November 2, 1998 - March 26, 2001) 

Not only can the WWF claim the moral victory of pounding WCW into submission (and then buying them cheap, to add insult to injury), they can also claim a clear, decisive win in just about every quantitative category we can measure:

• RAW scored 144 Monday ratings wins, besting Nitro's 106.
• RAW's average rating over the last five and a half years was a 4.3, besting Nitro's 3.4.
• The highest head-to-head rating ever scored (7.4) belongs to RAW, as does the largest head-to-head margin of victory (5.0).
• And most impressively, the WWF held an active 114 week winning streak at the end of the war, easily surpassing the once-presumed-unbeatable 83-week streak Nitro held from '96 to '98.

If you've been checking out the individual charts accompanying each Yearly Summary, you've started to get an idea of how this story fits together... but I think it's the overall graph(s) above that really illustrate(s) the tale of the Monday Night Wars.

The thing to keep your eye on, in my mind, is the Total Viewership line on the head-to-head chart, and how it relates to each show's individual performance. Note that in Year One, when both shows come out of their corners punching, total viewership shows a steady, full-point increase in the first six months. But as soon as the WWF entered its "dark age" in the summer of '96, WCW wasn't quite as compelled to put on strong Nitros, and their own growth became minimal, at best. This resulted in overall wrestling viewership stagnating, and even dipping slightly from mid '96 through Spring '97.

That's when RAW went to two hours, and began getting really interesting again. Nitro answered with good shows of its own. Total wrestling viewership surged four full ratings points in the next 18 months. And then, after a period of intense competition, Nitro began to fade. Total viewership leveled off. Then in the closing half of Year Four and into Year Five, Nitro entered what may well be termed its own personal "dark age" -- or perhaps, because of rapidly shifting creative regimes, it could be more accurately described as a series of separate Dark Ages.  Nitro's ratings continued to dive in Year Six, plummeting to all-time lows, as WCW's Monday viewership dropped well below even its seminal Year One numbers towards the close of the War. 

Total wrestling viewership remained steady during the early stages of Nitro's disintegration (as RAW's ratings continued to sky-rocket), but tailed off greatly in the last eighteen head-to-head months.  Year Four saw combined ratings for RAW and Nitro average a 9.7 for the year; it was common for both shows to combine for a rating over 10.0.  In Year Five, the two shows combined for an average of 9.1 (RAW actually gained a half point from its Year Four average, but this was more than off-set by WCW's 1.1 rating point drop from Year Four) before total wrestling viewership sank all the way to a Monday average of 7.5 for Year Six (with Nitro dropping a half point and RAW losing just about a full ratings point).  

Total viewership, which regularly exceeded 10.0 during the War's hey-day of 1999 and which still hovered around 9.0 as late as mid 2000, only exceeded 8.0 a handful of times in all of Year Six.  The trend lines really do tell the story... wrestling's hottest periods of growth were been before Nitro's streak and between the Nitro and RAW streaks. The first period of competition encompassed a 32-week period that saw total wrestling viewership rise by over a full ratings point. The second period of competitive Monday night battles was only a 24 week window, but it saw growth of 1.5 ratings points for the total Monday night wrestling audience.  Nitro's 83-week run and RAW's war-closing 114-week run featured nothing but noticeable stagnation and recession of the overall audience.

And interesting side note: these "competitive" periods comprised a total of only 56 weeks. Nitro's streak was 83 weeks long, and RAW's streak was 114 weeks. The streaks made up the meat of the Monday Night War:  almost 80 percent of the overall war, to be exact. And during those competitive 56 weeks (about 20% of the total War), the War saw 2.5 ratings points worth of its growth (close to 50% of total audience expansion during the war); the other 50% of growth was portioned out in more miserly fashion across the remaining 80% of weeks. 

Those periods of competition were the ones of the most extraordinary growth for the wrestling business... you're driven to put on a great show every week to better the competition, and the fans will show up to watch.  If you've got nothing driving you, though... well, maybe the product slips, and fans can walk away.

That theory seems to hold some water as we take a Very Special Look at....

RAW: After the War
April 2, 2001 - present

RAW POST-WAR SNAPSHOT 
Click Here for RAW's Post-War Ratings Chart
Number of RAWs: 127 
RAWs Over 5.0: 12 (last time: March 25, 2002)
RAWs 4.0-4.9: 60
RAWs Below 4.0: 55 
RAW Post-War High: 5.7 (on April 2, 2001, and on July 30, 2001)
RAW Post-War Low: 2.4 (on New Year's Eve 2001... lowest non-Holiday rating was 3.1 on November 11, 2002)
RAW Average Post-War Rating: 4.18 (down 0.1 from Overall War Rating... and down 0.9 from RAW's Year Six War Average)
RAW Unopposed Year 1 Average Rating: 4.6 (from April 2, 2001 to March 25, 2002... down 0.5 from Year Six Head-to-Head rating) 
RAW Unopposed Year 2 Average Rating: 3.8 (from April 1, 2002 to March 31, 2003... down 0.8 from Year One Unopposed rating) 
RAW Unopposed Year 3 Average Rating: 4.1 ( from April 7, 2003 thru September 1, 2003, so far... up 0.3 from Year Two Unopposed rating) 

Even as Nitro disintegrated and RAW's own ratings dipped in the final year of the war, the combined audience for wrestling remained solidly in the 7.0 range.  With RAW still averaging around 5.0 at that point, the WWF had to be hoping that they could pick up at least SOME of those extra 2 ratings points to help bolster their performance.

Coming out of the gates, the RAW monopoly seemed like it might accomplish just that.  RAW gained a full ratings point in its first unopposed night.  Not the entirety of WCW's audience, but a goodly chunk.  Hopes might have been on the rise...  but they were quickly dashed.  As the WWF decided to sit on debuting WCW and its stars in storylines, the entire 1.0 gain evaporated in less than a month.  But the end of April 2001, RAW's average audience size was exactly the same as it had been over the last three months of head-to-head battles with Nitro.  The only difference:  there was no Nitro siphoning off viewers.  One of two things had happened: either WCW fans had tried RAW and then decided to give it up, or the exodus of loyal WWF fans that had taken place steadily in Year Six of the War was continuing even after RAW had Mondays to itself.

And then: it got worse!  May 2001 saw RAW's rating dip to mid- and low-4s, numbers that continued through most of June.  These were RAW's lowest numbers since 1998; and again, this time, there was no Nitro to blame for the losses.  The beginning of the inVasion angle on June 25 sparked a half-point rise in RAW's ratings, bringing them just about up to the point where they'd been during the final days of the War.

The addition of ECW to the inVasion equation and some inspired storytelling regarding the loyalties of top WWF stars (including Austin's defection to the Alliance and the Rock's decision to stay loyal) resulted in further gains, as RAW regularly scored in the low- to mid-5s for much of July and August of 2001 (including a TNN best rating of 5.7 on July 30).  But again, as it became apparent that the WCW/ECW invasion was little more than a WWF storyline that was headed nowhere, fans zoned out again.

By September, ratings dipped back to end-of-the-War levels, and by October had sunk to the low-4s again.  On October 22, 2001, RAW scored its first sub-4 rating since early 1998.  Ratings hovered in the low-4s for much of the rest of the year (discounting a few holiday-depressed ratings on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve).  Then the WWF surged -- on the announced returns of Hulk Hogan and the nWo -- to mid- to upper-4s almost immediately after the New Year.  Ratings stayed there through the build-up to WrestleMania, and in fact, continued to rise immediately afterwards.  Closing out RAW's first unopposed year, RAW once again rose above 5.0 for two weeks as fans tuned in to see Hulk Hogan's post-WM return to babyface status, and then to watch the Brand Extension Draft on March 18 and 25, 2002.

And then, to start Solo Year Two, RAW immediately handed back about a half ratings point, and has not seen the high side of 5.0 since.  Probably annoyed by the thought that they'd only see half the talent roster on RAW, fans took RAW back down to the mid-4s for the month of April.  Then, with the announcement of the WWF's name change to WWE in early May, RAW almost immediately hemorrhaged another half-a-point.  The first week after the announcement of the WWE name, RAW's rating dropped from 4.6 to 3.9.

Whether the name change could really have that dramatic an effect or not (more likely, the reality of the "brand extension" was still setting in), interest in RAW dropped precipitously during the summer of 2002.  In fact, after a strong April, RAW only managed to score a 4.0 or better 4 more times during calendar year 2002.  In fact, the show began to languish in the mid- and lower-3s during the autumn, especially in November after a laughable Kane/HHH storyline alienated a few viewers (RAW's 3.1 rating on November 11, 2002, remains its lowest since the dark days of Savio Vega and The Patriot working in RAW main events).

In early 2003, the return of Steve Austin brought RAW back up to the upper-3s, and eventually over the 4.0 mark again.  During the stretch run to WrestleMania, Austin's comeback was augmented with the Rock's jump to RAW from SD! to confront Austin.  This resulted in a series of back-to-back-to-back 4-or-better ratings for RAW during March, as the company now known as WWE finished its second unopposed year in fairly strong fashion.  

The third unopposed year for RAW kicked off with the WWE debut of Goldberg, and no appreciable jump in ratings to go with it.  Goldberg's first non-wrestling month in the company saw ratings dip back to the mid-3s, then rising incredibly to a 4.4 on May 12, 2003, for Goldberg's in-ring RAW debut (in a cage match).  Since that time, fans have been alternately entertained and annoyed by RAW's storytelling (especially surrounding the now-unmasked Kane)... but they've also been tuning in every week.  Since July 1, 2003, RAW's rating has been above a 4.0 all but 2 weeks, the first such stretch since April, 2002.  In fact, RAW's Solo Year Three average to date is a 4.1, a gain of a third-of-a-point over the previous year's average.

To get the full picture on RAW's post-War performance as compared to how it did head-to-head with Nitro, I offer you this last graph: RAW's overall ratings chart from 1995 to the present day.

Perhaps finally, after over two years of owning a Monday Night Monopoly, WWE and RAW have found a groove that will allow them to sustain and perhaps even grow back their audience.  It would take another ratings point worth of growth to get the Fed back to where it was at the end of RAW vs. Nitro War....  is it fair, in lieu of Nitro, to ask RAW to battle against its own past?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But busting out these numbers and playing with the data is part of the fun of being a Tuesday morning booker.

The War is over, and has been for a long time.  The WWF/E was the clear winner.  But what did they win?  A failed "invasion" and two years of rating slides doesn't seem like much of a prize.  Perhaps the future will bring a creative renaissance and another wrestling boom?  Or maybe another Monday night competitor for Vince McMahon?  Or maybe we'll just be stuck here with our numbers and our fond memories of those heady nights when any wrestling fan with five hours and a remote control could visit Nirvana....

Stay tuned.  Please.  Vince is beggin' ya.

[A final note about methodology: I assembled all ratings data from various sources, most notably The Other Arena (an excellent wrestling reference site) and my own archived news updates and notes to myself. If any of it is in error, I take responsibility for not isolating and correcting the inconsistencies. Once collected, the data was placed in an Excel spreadsheet, which I used to tabulate totals and averages, and which was also used to generate the accompanying graphs and trendlines (which are all Order 5 Polynomial Trendlines, which I find best describe the general direction of the wildly fluctuating raw data). For the sake of fairness, no data from "unopposed" Mondays was included in averages, totals, or streaks; only the 253 "head-to-head" battles were used for that data. This was done despite the fact that for some of the Monday Night Wars, "head-to-head" is actually a misnomer (since on some nights that are counted as "head-to-head" nights, RAW and Nitro might run different lengths of time, start at different times, and experience only limited overlap with each other). For the sake of this feature, any night on which RAW and Nitro both aired in prime time (8-11pm, eastern) on Monday night is a "head-to-head" night. Any other questions/concerns about my specific methods may be forwarded to me via e-mail.]

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