Despite going up against the season finale of The Amazing Race on CBS, NBC’s Sunday Night Football game between the Skins and Ravens turned out to be the most watched program yesterday night. NBC’s coverage averaged just over 12 million viewers, versus 10 million plus from the Amazing Race, but it wasn’t nearly as impressive as FOX’s coverage of the Cowboys-Steelers game.
According to Sports Business Daily, FOX pulled a Cowboys-Steelers drew a 17.0/31 overnight, which made it the highest NFL rating this season. However, according to Media Life Magazine, the BCS Selection Show following the game didn’t fair so well….
The network got a huge lift from NFL overrun at 7 p.m., with much of the country watching the Pittsburgh Steelers’ exciting final-minutes triumph over the Dallas Cowboys. Fox averaged a 7.6 in the hour, by far the highest rating of the night.
At 8 p.m., the half hour “BCS Selection Show” averaged a less-impressive 3.9 rating, off 9 percent from last year’s 4.3. Still, it easily won its timeslot even against the start of NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.”
In the marquee announcement, Florida and Oklahoma received bids to the BCS national title game, to be played Jan. 8 on Fox.
As a reminder, all ratings are based on live-plus-same-day DVR playback. Seven-day DVR data won’t be available for several weeks. Twenty-eight percent of Nielsen households have DVRs.
Ouch. I guess the fact that everyone already knew the matchups ahead of time didn’t help, but you would think a few more people would have turned in. Last year’s attempt was pretty pedestrian, and while I still can’t stand the giant “reveal” that they try to pull off and all the commercials, I did watch a few minutes of it before the Skins got destroyed by the Ravens. I don’t know how to fix it because learning about five games just isn’t all that exciting. Maybe they should have skipped the “OT” and gone straight into the BCS Selections, so they could avoid crossover with the Sunday Night game.
Fox takes Sunday, powered by pigskin (Media Life)
(P.S.- The Pammy Nominees will be coming tomorrow with the regular season winner likely announced on Wednesday)
