Broncos-Chiefs opener draws 23.2 million viewers, ESPN's most-watched Week 1 Monday game

The first Monday night of the NFL season drew a crowd. Kansas City's 31-10 win over Denver averaged 23.2 million viewers, making it ESPN's most-watched Week 1 Monday Night Football game and the third-most watched Monday night game in the network's history.

That figure bundles every platform that carried the game — ESPN and ABC, the ManningCast on ESPN2, the Spanish-language broadcast on ESPN Deportes and the stream on NFL+ — and ESPN did not break out how many viewers watched on each. The audience came in 5 percent higher than last season's Week 1 Monday game, which drew 22.1 million.

Monday Night Countdown drew 1.9 million viewers, a 7 percent increase over the same week last year. That is a modest bump, particularly since the pregame show now airs on both ESPN and NFL Network. The historical comparisons ESPN likes to make carry their own caveat: out-of-home viewers counted in today's numbers were not part of the sample in earlier eras, which is why the network frames its records as belonging to a specific television age.