The Week 12 Monday night Panthers-49ers game averaged only 12.368 million viewers

Most Wednesdays, ESPN P.R. posts a tweet boasting about the audience generated by the NFL game televised two nights earlier. This year, the habit sparked pushback during the YouTube TV outage that knocked a pair of Monday night games off of the platform.For the first game after the Disney-owned networks returned to YouTube TV (Cowboys at Raiders), there it was: 17.9 million. For the next game, the Week 12 contest between the Panthers and 49ers, there was nothing on the ESPN P.R. Twitter page.On Friday morning, Nielsen distributed the official numbers for the week of November 24 through November 30. The Panthers-49ers game televised by ESPN, ESPN, and ESPN Deportes, attracted an audience of only 12.368 million.It speaks, frankly, to the general ambivalence regarding the upstart Panthers. After multiple years of irrelevance, no amount of hype (including a 30-secon commercial during the Cowboys-Raiders game set to Bohemian Rhapsody) could truly move the needle for what should have been, on paper, a compelling game.Throw in the fact that the game itself wasn't particularly exciting, and the numbers speak for themselves.In the interests of full disclosure, the...