BYU beat Utah decisively last Saturday in the TV ratings — and without the aid of Cougar fans watching the Utes, it wouldn't have been as close as it was.
The two teams meet on the football field Saturday, but they met on the television field of competition this past Saturday. BYU's game at Wyoming aired at 4 p.m. on KSL-Ch. 5; Utah's home game against New Mexico began a half hour later on KJZZ-Ch. 14. So the majority of the two games aired in direct competition.
The BYU broadcast won a clear victory, averaging a 9 rating and an 18 share of the audience to Utah's 6.3 rating and 13 share.
A rating point equals 1 percent of the 810,830 households in the Salt Lake television market (which includes all of Utah and parts of Wyoming, Nevada and Idaho). So an average of almost 73,000 homes were watching BYU, according to A.C. Nielsen; just more than 51,000 homes were watching Utah. A share point is one percent of the homes actually watching TV at a given time.
None of this is particularly surprising; BYU football has consistently outrated Utah, even while the Cougars were suffering through three miserable years and the Utes were winning back-to-back league championships and busting the BCS.
A closer look at Saturday's numbers isn't exactly surprising, either, but it does give us a look at what was going on in a lot of homes in Utah at the time. Ratings are measured in 15-minute intervals, and the two highest-rated quarter-hours in either game came in the Utah game.
The BYU game never went higher than a 10.8 in any quarter-hour; the Utah game had consecutive quarter-hours rated 11.1 and 11.6.
Not coincidentally, those 30 minutes came just as the BYU game ended — a rather clear indication that viewers were changing channels from 5 to 14 to watch the end of the Utah game.
The average rating of the Utah-New Mexico game before the BYU game ended: 5.1.
The average rating of the Utah-New Mexico game after the BYU game ended: 10.8.
It isn't hard to guess which viewers turned off their TVs happy and which ones did not.
There's no competition between local teams on local stations this Saturday, of course. It's Utah-at-BYU at 1 p.m. on Ch. 14 — ESPN-plus picked up the game.
NOBODY WATCHES halftime. Well, not nobody, but halftime viewing falls off a lot.
The quarter-hour entirely filled with halftime "festivities" during the BYU game pulled a 5.7 rating; the quarter hours before and after pulled an 8.8 and an 8.7, respectively.
The quarter-hour entirely filled with halftime "festivities" during the Utah game pulled a 1.2 rating; the quarter hours before and after pulled a 5.3 and a 4.7.
Gee, the announcers can say just about whatever they want — nobody's listening.
ONE LAST TIME, aren't we all sick of the ESPN contract that meant that BYU and Utah both had to play games so late in the day last Saturday in order for them to be on TV?
Now, if only somebody could figure out exactly what the new contract with CSTV actually means for next season . . .
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com