Trump Says NFL Ratings Are 'Way Down' Due To Protests. But The NFL Says They Are Up.

More people are watching top NFL games than ever watched "The Apprentice."
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President Donald Trump wants you to think NFL ratings are down because some of its players kneel in protest during the national anthem:

They aren’t.

Not only are ratings for NFL games not “way down” as Trump claimed on Twitter early Tuesday, they’re actually up.

This past weekend’s NFL ratings were 3 percent higher overall than for the same weekend last year, a league spokesman told HuffPost Tuesday. And ESPN’s Monday night game was up 63 percent, compared with the Monday game at this time last year.

NFL games constituted seven of the top 10 most-watched TV broadcasts the previous week, with football sweeping the top five most-watched shows, outranking even the Emmy Awards, in ninth place.

Per the NFL, that week’s most-watched show, Sunday’s game between the Denver Broncos and the Dallas Cowboys, raked in 25.96 million viewers.

For comparison, that’s about 6 million more viewers than the average tuned in to watch the first season of “The Apprentice,” the reality TV show that starred Trump. “Apprentice” viewership declined rapidly after that first season, to an average of 4.67 million viewers by the time the show turned 10, making it the 113th most-watched show on basic cable.

CORRECTION: An earlier version mistakenly referred to viewership data from the NFL’s Week 2 games as Week 3 games.

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