The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed what has been floating around for a few days, that the 2.5 Raw rating was in fact a technical glitch on Nielsen Media's end. (The ratings analysts.) For 5 days their equipment was giving faulty readings for just The USA Network, from July 28th, until August 1st.

A spokeswoman for Nielsen said "Under reporting only affected the USA Network and was corrected on Thursday." They are doing their best to reverse engineer the errors and come out with proper ratings, although nothing is guaranteed.

We'll have to look at yesterday's Raw rating when it comes in to see if the rating remains low.

Wade Keller of the Pro Wrestling Torch has done some analysis with the other shows that were affected and looked at their average and then their percentage drop. Applying this percentage to Raw resulted in a rating of around 3.0, still down from the 3.4 the previous week. Obviously this is far from mathematically correct and we may never know what the mystery of the 2.5 rating was.

It is believed that Vince would have never returned Monday if he realized the rating was a glitch.