Twenty years after the Domecoming shook the Superdome to its foundation, its anniversary barely registered a tremor on the Nielsen meters.

Monday’s Falcons-Saints game averaged 11.9 million viewers across ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN Deportes, including over-the-air simulcasts in the home markets, according to Sports Media Watch. It was the season’s first cable-exclusive Monday Night Football game and, unsurprisingly, the least-watched by a wide margin. Each of the first three games, all simulcast on ABC, cleared 19 million, and Eagles-Bears alone drew 22.6 million one week earlier, as Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio noted.

For what it’s worth, Week 4 dragged down all three primetime windows to their smallest audiences of the season, but none of them fell as far as ESPN. NBC’s Lions-Panthers game drew 19.51 million, a steep 29% drop from Lions-Chiefs a year ago and the lowest Week 4 Sunday Night Football audience since 2020. Prime Video’s Steelers-Browns game barely set a season low at 16.59 million, yet it still grew double digits from last year, despite going head-to-head with winner-take-all baseball and WNBA games.

Falcons-Saints, the game the NFL had circled since releasing its schedule in May, finished nearly five million viewers behind even that.

Roger Goodell told the league’s schedulers he wanted Falcons-Saints on a Monday night in New Orleans within a few weeks of Sept. 25, the 20th anniversary of the 2006 Domecoming. That night marked the Saints’ return to the Superdome for the first time since Hurricane Katrina, a storm that killed nearly 1,400 people and turned the stadium into a shelter of last resort for thousands of displaced residents. NFL broadcast planning chief Mike North made clear the commissioner’s wish wasn’t optional, even if the exact date was flexible.

“It wasn’t a requirement it had to land in a special week, but it was a requirement, straight from the boss, that it landed on our schedule,” North said in May.

The ideal slot would have been Week 3, lining up almost perfectly with the 2006 game, but North said the league wasn’t willing to rework the rest of its schedule just to hit the anniversary on the nose. The Falcons, according to one Saints insider, weren’t eager to take part at all. The NFL scheduled it anyway, and it had good reason to believe the moment would carry an audience.

Unfortunately, the rematch — a 45-24 Falcons rout — offered viewers precious little reason to share that sentiment.