Gee, what a difference a couple of days makes.

As of this past Saturday morning, lots of TV pundits were declaring this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament the greatest ever. By Monday night, the championship game was losing in the ratings to the game show "Deal or No Deal."

(Which, among other things, reinforces my belief that you can't accurately judge anything while it's ongoing — it's sort of like calling "Lost" the best science fiction show ever midway through its first season.)

It's not that American television viewers have suddenly turned their backs on college basketball in general and the NCAA basketball tournament specifically. It's not that American TV viewers have suddenly been smitten with "Deal" host Howie Mandel.

What happened is that, after all those exciting games in the first four rounds of the NCAAs, the last three games were snoozers. It's hard to keep viewers interested when you're telecasting 14-, 15- and 16-point blowouts.

Adding to CBS's misery was that George Mason's Cinderella story came to a sudden, premature end on Saturday. And that Florida jumped out in front of UCLA early on Monday and it was never a competitive game.

Ho, hum.

Which proves one other thing — no matter how big the hype, no matter how potentially interesting a matchup, a blowout kills ratings.

MEANWHILE, THE WOMEN'S NCAA tournament improved its ratings dramatically over 2005 — the championship game (on ESPN) was up 19 percent and the tournament overall was up 15 percent.

Of course, the women's title game ratings were only about 28 percent of the men's; overall, the women's tournament garnered about 24 percent of the men's ratings.

OK, OK, the NCAA title game didn't exactly lose a head-to-head battle with "Deal or No Deal" because the two didn't air head-to-head in any time zone. The two-hour game show started 81 minutes before the game in the Eastern and Central zones; 21 minutes before the game in Mountain; and 99 minutes after the game Pacific.

But "Deal" did attract ratings about 13 percent higher than the NCAA final.

And ratings for the Florida-UCLA game were 25 percent lower than the North Carolina-Illinois final in 2005. And the semifinals on Saturday were down 8 percent (first game) and 24 percent (second game), respectively.

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IT WOULD APPEAR that ESPN has sullied its reputation without much in the way of a return — the ridiculous Barry Bonds reality show/infomercial that debuted on ESPN2 on Tuesday drew a meager 0.4 rating, no higher than what the cable network generally gets in the time slot.

Bonds — who controls the content of the shows — was oblivious to the fact that it clearly showed himself to be a liar. Defending himself against his detractors, he said, "They can take me down. I don't really care. I never cared. Baseball, if they want to take me down, go right ahead take it. Anyone who ever knows me knows . . . I don't care."

If he didn't care, he wouldn't be doing this show.


E-mail: pierce@desnews.com

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