Whether you’re for a college football playoff, or against one, you’d be hard-pressed to find a lot of people who didn’t think there were too many bowl games this year.
And a lot of them weren’t very good.
So, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise when 23 of the 35 bowls this postseason had lower television ratings from the previous year. Included in those 23 were Rose Bowl and the BCS National Championship, although those two still yielded the highest ratings. Overall, bowl television ratings were down nine percent this year.
Naturally, games like the Meineke Car Care Bowl and the Little Caesar’s Pizza Bowl didn’t draw a lot of attention, but games like the Music City Bowl and the Outback Bowl, which featured the story lines surrounding Urban Meyer and Joe Paterno, drew roughly a 150-percent increase in ratings from the year before. It also didn’t hurt that those were two of the best games.
One of the things that has always been appealing about bowl season is every day for about two weeks there’s a game on television, sometimes two or three. But the latest numbers, courtesy of al.com, show that more isn’t necessarily better. You could look at the ratings and say there are only 8 or 10 games that were of any real interest and only about half of those turned out to be quality games.
In a field of 70 teams, good matchups are few and far between. When conference affiliations and selections come in to play, it becomes even more of a shot in the dark.
I’ve never fully advocated a playoff, and I’m not nearly as smart as Mark Cuban to come up with a plan for one, but at some point the priorities of quality and quantity need to be addressed. Based on the television ratings that were just released, it looks as though people want quality.
And you’re more likely to get that quality in a playoff.
Source:
No comments:
Post a Comment