Sports on the Air /
Viewers still drawn to Bills
This is what I’m thinking:
• Here’s an indication of the optimism surrounding the Buffalo Bills’ season. Despite the competition from NBC’s Olympic coverage from Beijing for two games, the four preseason games carried on Channel 7 averaged more than a 16 rating. Even Thursday night’s snooze-fest without starters — in which Detroit beat the Bills, 14-6 — averaged a 15.1 rating and hit as high as a 17.6.
The Bills averaged about a 12 rating for four preseason games in 2007 but there are some asterisks. The first three games this preseason were on the road when Ralph Wilson Stadium wasn’t filled with 60,000-75,000 potential viewers. And a tape-delayed game last preseason only averaged a 4.4 rating.
• The 1990 Buffalo Bills are among five Super Bowl losers profiled in a Sept. 18 program, “America’s Game: The Missing Rings” on the NFL Network.
Asked why that Super Bowl loser was picked among the four the Bills lost, filmmaker Steve Sabol told reporters: “Marv [Levy] says that he felt that if they would have won that game, they would have gone on to win at least another Super Bowl. . . . The first one is usually the [one in which] feelings are the most acute. Plus, this had an incredibly climactic and gut-wrenching ending with the [Scott] Norwood [missed] field goal.” Yeah, we know.
• Hey, I got one prediction right. In my pre-Olympic story, I speculated that a prime-time rating in the 15-18 range for the Beijing Games would be a reasonable achievement for NBC.
NBC averaged a 16.2 prime-time rating nationally and said that 214 million viewers watched over the 17 days to make the Beijing Games the most-viewed event in TV history.
With so many hours of coverage on so many outlets, that achievement was probably inevitable.
Locally, Channel 2, the NBC affiliate, averaged an 18.8 rating, which is about 15 percent higher than the network average. But that didn’t get it in the top 20 of NBC affiliates.
The 18.8 rating translates to about 125,000 households tuned in to NBC’s coverage of the Games in prime time in Western New York every night.
And that doesn’t count viewers who might have watched Canada’s coverage on CBC.
NBC’s cable networks had much stronger demographics than usual, but the viewership was extremely small by comparison to the network’s prime time. USA averaged a 0.7, CNBC 0.32, MSNBC 0.46 and Oxygen 0.43.
By the way, CBC reports that about 24 million viewers watched its Beijing coverage, with about 1.3 million tuning in during prime time nightly.
• I imagine Western New Yorkers are cheering ESPN’s decision to give viewers more of analyst Ron Jaworski during ESPN’s Monday Night Football and less of pointless celebrity interviews and sideline reports during the games. Jay Rothman, the senior executive producer, said this about the Lackawanna native in a conference call this week with reporters: “We are going to make him the new [John] Madden.”
• Former Bill Ron Pitts will work with analyst Tony Boselli on Fox’s coverage of the Bills’ opener with Seattle on Sept. 7. The game is on Fox because Seattle — the road team — is in the NFC. All eyes probably will be on new Fox sideline reporter Charissa Thompson, who has worked on cable’s Best Damn Sports Show and for the Big Ten Network. Needless to say, she’s a looker.
• If you want the Big Ten Network, you better make your feelings known. A Time Warner Cable spokesman confirmed it has a deal in principle to carry it. However, he added that after the deal is finalized, TWC will decide what systems will carry the channel “based on customer interest.” TWC has added ESPNU to its HD lineup on Channel 725 just in time for the college football season.
• Steve Tasker is back working with play-by-play man Gus Johnson this season for CBS’ coverage of the NFL. Don Criqui is working with two analysts — Steve Beuerlein and Dan Fouts. Fouts has moved from ABC to CBS, where he will work both college and NFL games. Besides working with Criqui, he also will do games with Bill Macatee and Dick Enberg.
• If you run into Jimmy Arias, don’t bother to ask about his experiences in Beijing covering tennis during the Olympics for NBC. He did his analysis from a New York studio.
