UFC 235 was billed as the promotion’s biggest event thus far in 2019, and while we won’t know pay-per-view buys for a little while longer, the preliminary card broadcast on ESPN proved to be a smash hit.
According to Nielsen numbers, the two-hour broadcast — really it’s 1 hour and 45 minutes because the college basketball lead-in ran over its timeslot — averaged 1.48 million viewers, the strongest for any UFC preliminary card PPV since UFC 207: Nunes vs. Rousey in 2016. It also drew a 0.63 rating, good for #1 among all cable programming (which excludes ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX) on Saturday.