Did WWE's NXT Arrival Special Really Hurt Last Week's TNA Impact Wrestling Ratings?

- As noted, the February 27th episode of TNA's Impact Wrestling scored a 0.95 cable rating and 1.06 million viewers. This is the same show that saw WWE's live NXT Arrival show go up against hour one.

When the rating first came out, there was talk that it was hurt bad by NXT Arrival but the quarter-hour ratings and other data says otherwise. Impact got its usual strong lead-in from Cops and opened at a 1.12 rating, which is down from the 1.4 opening ratings the show had been doing the past few weeks. One could assume that drop was due to NXT but since NXT ended at 10pm, you could assume that would lead to a big comeback in Impact's second hour but that didn't happen.

Impact had the usual increase at 10pm but it dropped hard to a 0.83 rating at 10:15pm. This is the lowest quarter-rating in a long time for Impact and by that time, Arrival was already over. One could argue that if there were 350,000 regular Impact viewers that watched NXT instead, which would be hard to believe, that not all 350,000 would come back for Impact's second hour, but most would, and there's no evidence that any unusual number of viewers came back at all.

Source: Wrestling Observer Newsletter

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