The Alliance of American Football is not dead.

This week, the fledgling football league got a $250 million cash infusion from Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon, who now becomes AAF chairman.

And despite questions about whether or not the league was even going to be able to make payroll, the ratings were pretty solid for round two of the competition:

Sure, those numbers are a drop from week one, when the CBS game beat the Rockets/Thunder number on ABC. Of course there’s going to be a decline when moving on from the league debut, but that week two TNT number is good. That’s more than a million people watching the AAF on cable television:

Nope, not at all!

Here are some relevant and somewhat similar numbers via Show Buzz Daily:

  • Sunday, 12:40 p.m., Rangers vs. Penguins on NBC: 1,093,000
  • Sunday, 9:00 p.m., UFC Fight Night, Ngannou vs. Velasquez on ESPN: 1,463,000
  • Tuesday, 8:00 pm., Celtic vs. Sixers on TNT: 1,803,000
  • Saturday, 12:00 p.m., Michigan vs. Maryland on FOX: 1,093,000

So that first number is decent when you consider that some over the air college basketball and NHL games were pulling just above a million as well.

For further comparison, MLS Cup in December drew an average of 1.56 million viewers on FOX, with a number peaking at 2.07 million. Some of the national weekly MLS broadcasts will land in that 400-500 thousand range, which will bring the numbers level with those AAF week two games that appeared on the NFL Network. Local MLS games are pulling maybe 100 to 150 thousand followers, though with the Union buried on PHL17, I can’t imagine they’re very high.

In the NHL, the most recent Stanley Cup finals between Vegas and Washinton aired on NBC and NBCSN and averaged about 5 million viewers per game. Those numbers were up significantly from other recent finals, though regular season games averaged about 400 thousand viewers on NBC and NBCSN in 2018.

So when you compare the AAF’s two-week pull to what you’ve seen via other sports outside of the NFL, NBA, and MLB, the league should be pretty happy with what they’re seeing so far, especially considering the fact that you had a busy sports weekend with a lot of college basketball and the NBA All-Star festivities taking place. There was a fourth AAF game that was played Sunday on CBSSN, but apparently they don’t make their numbers public.

But having games on the NFL Network seems to help, premium channel or not, and I think you’re seeing that the demand for football year-round is certainly there. Some people might be fatigued, but others, not so much.