By Jake Donovan
It was another night of a divided audience between American cable giants HBO and Showtime, with the networks offering dueling boxing telecasts on October 3.
The ratings once again suggest that going head-to-head is never good for business. And both shows were likely affected by college football, with the game between Clemson and Notre Dame securing a whopping 7.6 million viewers.
HBO claimed a ratings victory over Showtime, but neither network has much to brag about given the viewership tallies provided by Nielsen Media Research .
On the HBO side, Viktor Postol turned in one of the year's most shocking results - not so much his win over Lucas Matthysse, but the manner in which it ended. The rangy boxer from Ukraine - trained by Hall of Fame coach Freddie Roach - stopped Matthysse in the 10th round of their HBO headliner from Carson, California, which drew an average audience of 663,000 viewers.
In the chief support, Antonio Orozco preserved his unbeaten record with a 10-round win over former three-division titlist Humberto Soto. The fight averaged 698,000 viewers; peaked at 798,000 viewers.
Along with the undesirable in-ring result - which was preceded by a tease of Matthysse facing Manny Pacquiao early next year had he won - the rating was also a massive drop from the 1.243 million viewers who tuned in for Matthysse's 12-round win over Ruslan Provodnikov in April. Still, it was the second time this year that the Argentine slugger appeared on an HBO show that performed considerably better than its premium cable counterpart. Matthysse-Postol averaged 642,000 viewers and peaked at 814,000 viewers.
Matthysse's aforementioned win over Provodnikov outperformed that of Julio Cesar Chavez Jr's knockout loss to Andrzej Fonfara in April. This time around, his fight - albeit in a losing performance - outdrew another major TV star, as Adrien Broner returned to Showtime for the first time in 13 months.
The brash former three-division champ added a fourth belt in as many weight classes in a 12th round knockout win over Khabib Allakhverdiev at home in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the evening's co-feature, Jose Pedraza barely edged Edner Cherry to retain his super featherweight title.
The Showtime doubleheader drew an average of just over 500,000 viewers, a massive drop from Broner's previous appearance on the network and at home, when his decision win over Emmanuel Taylor generated an average of 852,000 viewers.
It's also a steep decline from his two appearances on free-to-air NBC in primetime this year, with both telecasts serving as the two highest rated televised boxing cards of 2015.
Ratings website ShowBuzzDaily.com was the first to report the ratings.
Jake Donovan is the managing editor of BoxingScene.com.
Twitter: @JakeNDaBox
Facebook Page: JakeBScene
