Utah's football team made a great showing in the Fiesta Bowl, trouncing Big East champion Pittsburgh. Utah's football fans made a great showing in Tempe, traveling by the tens of thousands to fill the stands.
The Fiesta Bowl itself didn't do so great in the TV ratings. Oh, it easily beat the competition — which was pretty non-existent — on the other networks on Saturday night. But the ratings were down 5 percent from what the Orange Bowl did in the same time slot a year ago.
(Last year's Orange Bowl aired in the post-Rose Bowl slot on New Year's Day.)
The Utah-Pitt game averaged a 9.2 rating on Saturday. (A ratings point represents 1,096,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 109.6 million TV homes.) The game averaged 12.2 million viewers, good for No. 15 in the prime-time rankings last week.
Don't get me wrong. These are really good numbers. This game offered Utah the kind of television exposure no other Mountain West Conference team has ever had before — a prime-time game on a major broadcast network with no competition from other games.
(BYU's 1996 appearance in the Cotton Bowl was also on New Year's, but it was during the day when there are fewer people watching TV. And it aired opposite all or part of several other games.)
Maybe I'm paranoid, but my fear here is that network executives will look at this and say, "See — there just isn't as much interest in a team from a mid-major conference." And they might point to the fact that last year's Orange Bowl featured two teams from the same state (Miami and Florida State) but still attracted more viewers from across the country.
Quite frankly, Utah did nothing to help itself in terms of the ratings. The first half wasn't exactly scintillating for non-Ute or Panther fans, and the second half turned into a blowout that had people turning off their TVs or changing channels. And last year's Orange Bowl was close.
It's not like this was something exclusive to the Fiesta Bowl. The only people more unhappy during this year's Orange Bowl than Oklahoma fans were ABC executives. When the game got out of hand, the fans changed channels.
This year's "national championship" game was down 7 percent from last year's "national championship" game in the Sugar Bowl. But a year ago the Sooners lost (to LSU) by only a touchdown, as opposed to the 36-point drubbing they suffered at the hands of USC on Tuesday.
I'd argue that the fact that the Utah-Pitt game did as well as it did despite the lopsided outcome speaks in favor of fan interest. And I'd point out that, despite the incredibly exciting game Texas and Michigan played in the Rose Bowl, the rating for that game was down 3 percent from last year, giving the Fiesta Bowl less of a lead-in.
And, being that I can't let go of this one, I'd ask what the ratings would have been like if, say, undefeated Utah and undefeated Auburn had played, with the winner of that game getting a shot at the winner of undefeated Southern Cal and undefeated Oklahoma.
Just asking.
I'M GOING TO SCREAM: If I hear one more "expert analyst" on one more national sports show on one more national network talk about how the college football season ended with two undefeated teams and wouldn't it be great if we got to decide this on the field between USC and Auburn.
I know that a lot of TV sports reporting is shallow, but they can't move their eyes down a couple more places on the final rankings and see that Utah is 12-0?
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com