UFC 236’s preliminary card broadcast on ESPN proved to be a significant drop from the promotion’s previous two pay-per-views.
Last Saturday’s two-hour slate of fights averaged 893,000 viewers and a rating of 0.39, good for 9th among all Saturday cable programming but well off from UFC 234 and 235. For reference, UFC 234 did 1.34 million viewers and a 0.53 rating, while UFC 235 did 1.48 million viewers and a 0.63 rating. Both of those PPVs had college basketball games as lead-ins, whereas UFC 236 technically had 30-minutes of SportsCenter buffering them and the NBA playoff game between the Orlando Magic and Toronto Raptors.