Major League Rugby Commissioner Dean Howes called his league’s championship broadcast on Sunday a “fork in the road” for the sport in the U.S., setting it on a path toward true crossover appeal with new and casual fans. The Seattle Seawolves’ last-second win over San Diego Legion on CBS averaged 510,000 viewers, the first time MLR had appeared on either a broadcast channel or a network rated by Nielsen in its two-year history. Its regular season games have been on the unrated CBSSN or online. For comparison, the Premier Lacrosse League broadcast on NBC 90 minutes earlier had 306,000 viewers, and the WNBA had 471,000 viewers in a similar window one day earlier.
“I would have liked 10 times that number, emotionally, but it met our expectations and I think that it is literally a fork in the road for rugby, to just change the trajectory,” Howes said. “We’ve done a great job over the last three years as we’ve led up to this show on CBS, and a well-produced game is just one of those things that puts you in a lane, and gives you momentum, and that’s what we need.” Howes thinks the time buy on CBS shows off the sport to crucial converts they need along with core fans. The game did a 0.8 rating in Seattle and a 0.4 in San Diego.
