Lol, I looked up ESPN's performance on YouTube which is a decent proxy for ratings in today's on demand world.
Top videos like NFL or College Football are managing ~300k views. This is "better" than some podcasts but terrible considering the production costs.
Most of their other programs are getting 5-10k views. That's insanely bad, like, your aunt has a YouTube channel talking about knitting from her phone bad...but again with all the production costs.
There are basement dwelling Youtubers who cover sports that get millions of views with essentially pennies for production for perspective.
ESPN is basically living on the life support system that is cable bundle packages.