By Wade Keller, Torch editor

Last night's TNA Impact drew an average rating of 1.13, just a fraction less than the 1.18 rating drawn by ECW earlier in the week. (There is also a 1.2 number floating around, but it appears to be inaccurate based on an averaging of the quarter hour ratings of the show).

The show opened with a 1.16 rating and finished with a 1.17 rating, which is a good thing. However, it dropped to a 0.98 in Q2 for Kevin Nash vs. A.J. Styles, the second week in a row a Nash match has drawn poorly in quarter hours.

It rebounded for the battle royal and the start of Samoa Joe vs. Tomko for show-high ratings of 1.21 for that 30 minute stretch. It dropped again for Q6 featuring Rhino vs. Judas Mesias, then grew to a 1.15 and the final 1.17 for the women's match and main event cage match between Kurt Angle and Christian.

Keller's Analysis: It's worth watching these Kevin Nash ratings. There's so much talk about his bad knees and how brittle he is, it might be responsible for hurting his image. Or perhaps TNA has built up a fanbase that wants highly athletic, younger wrestlers and Nash doesn't appeal to them. If the next Nash TV match drops, TNA has to rethink featuring him in singles matches without figuring out first how to recast his image which has been brutalized over the past year. In fairness to Nash, more than six of the first nine minutes of that quarter hour were commercials as they cut to a break just seconds into the Styles-Nash match, and then after the very short Nash-Styles match, they featured a Black Reign promo and then another three minutes of commercials to end that 15 minute segment. So literally nine out of fifteen minutes were commercial in that quarter, which probably has more to do the ratings drop than anything.

Want to know precisely how TNA's creative process works? Jason Powell published an exclusive detailed breakdown of the weekly schedule and repsonsibilities in a news update today: TNA Impact Hitlist for his signature analysis of this week's show and compare it to our own Jon Mezzera's TNA Hits & Misses column available on our main listing or in The Specialists section.

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