BoxRec

Unfortunately, it wasn’t witnessed by nearly as many viewers as when he first won the title.

The hard-hitting lightweight from Ghana was dominant in an 8th round stoppage of former titlist Raymundo Beltran atop the June 28 edition of Top Rank Boxing on ESPN. The show aired live from Pechanga Resort & Casino in Temecula, Calif., averaging 490,000 viewers over the course of the two-hour telecast.

The event marked Commey’s first main event on ESPN and second straight appearance on the platform. His previous outing came in February, scoring a 2nd round knockout of Isa Chaniev to win the lightweight title in the opening leg of an ESPN-televised doubleheader topped by featherweight titlist Oscar Valdez, with the show averaging a 2019 season-best 880,000 viewers and peaking at more than 1 million viewers.

The majority of the ESPN boxing telecasts in 2019 have aired live in primetime on Saturday evenings. This edition was just the second of the year to air on a Friday (excluding ESPN+ exclusive cards), the lone other occasion coming in February when Rob Brant defended his middleweight title for the first time atop a show which averaged 704,000 viewers.

In stark contrast, the June 28 show produced the third-lowest average viewership for an ESPN boxing telecast this year.

The good news is that far more eyes should be on Commey’s future lightweight run.

These Top Rank cards should be doing so much better on ESPN. If FOX are averaging 2 million per show, then ESPN should be doing 1 million. Boxing is boxing and it’s available in much more homes than Showtime, but a crap card on Showtime is doing better than this.

This is Sho-Box numbers at best.

ESPN should wriggle out of this deal. TR is dying outside it’s big names and there ain’t many of them either. Just shoving them on the app.

An average below 500K is really disappointing for Commey-Beltran. A popular Mexican slugger like Beltran should draw a lot more viewers than an unknown, 2nd-tier Russian like Isa Chaniev.

I wasnt channel-surfing so I have no idea what kind of competition ESPN had on other channels that night, so I cant say what's behind the disappointing numbers!!

There's really no other big sports going on right now that would explain the low numbers for the fight.

No one can say it was in competition with football or the basketball playoffs.

Didn't a women's bout attract around 800,000 a few weeks back?

Perhaps viewers have become more accustomed to ESPN Saturday night boxing and this card was simply overlooked.