Thursday, January 10, 2013

BCS Championship Game: Did People Really Watch It?



The BCS National Championship game had been hyped up for over a month.  People were excited to see a great game and to finally see Notre Dame return to glory.  Two of the best defenses in the league were going up against each other in what everyone thought would be a low scoring hard fought game.  Instead we saw a complete domination by Alabama who made the Notre Dame’s defense look like a Pop Warner team.  Even though this was a complete blowout ESPN still won when it came to viewership.


Even though the game didn’t live up to the hype it still had an overnight rating of 15.7.  This was 14% higher than last year’s game.  A lot of people probably stayed tune to see if Notre Dame could make a historic comeback.  Others like me stayed tuned in to watch the train wreck which was Notre Dame’s defense.  Honestly the real reason was probably to get another glance of AJ McCarron’s girlfriend Katherine Webb. 

When all of the views were tallied up, 26.38 million people watched the game.  This was the second biggest audience in cable history behind the 2011 BCS game between Auburn and Oregon.  This game would have been the biggest if it wasn’t for the blowout.  Also it might have been higher if almost 200,000 people, including Lebron James and Darnell Dockett, weren’t running to their computers to start following Katherine Webb on Twitter.  

In end this shows that ESPN’s huge deal to broadcast all of the bowl games is having a good ROI.  They can only hope that every year the game can either break or come close to breaking the cable television viewing record.  For Alabama they are in the middle of a very impressive run, three titles in four years, and I do not see them slowing down anytime soon.  In 2014 I look forward to seeing Alabama again hopefully in a much better game. 

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