SKEDBALL: Weekend Ratings Bowl

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Welcome to the first edition of ShowbuzzDaily’s SKEDBALL, a weekly look at the weekend afternoon sports daypart on television.  This past Saturday was filled with college football games, as is typical in the fall, and one game truly broke out of the pack: Texas A&M’s stunning upset of formerly #1 Alabama.  CBS Sports’ coverage of the 3:45 ET game hit a 6.6 household rating and 14 share in the 56 “overnight” markets, where Nielsen measures local ratings.  As you can see in the chart below, this is the only Saturday sports program with a HH share in double digits.

The next closest sporting event Saturday was Notre Dame at Boston College in prime time on ABC.  That game’s 3.8 HH rating and 7 share is good but not great, and as we saw from the fast national ratings for prime time, that translates to about a 1.8-2.0 rating with the important 18-49 demographic.  It’s not a perfect formula, but a very rough approximation for sports ratings is that the 18-49 rating ends up being about half of the household rating.  According to that rule of thumb, the Texas A&M-Alabama game on CBS should come in around a 3.0-3.5 adult 18-49 rating, an excellent number for a Saturday afternoon.

Most of the other college football games fall in the 3-5 household share range, barely a blip on the ratings scene.  And many of the non-marquee game ratings would be even lower without regionalization, which ABC does quite often.  For example, at 3:30 pm Saturday ABC offered Penn State-Nebraska to 30 of the 56 metered markets (representing 44% of the country), while the other 26 metered markets (covering 26% of the country) received West Virginia-Oklahoma State.  Neither game did extraordinarily well within their region, but if only one game had been offered nationally, the overall rating int he time period would have been even lower probably.

Of course, there were sports other than football offered Saturday.  NBC tried a little motocross coverage and an encore of Ironman competition, hitting far less than a 1 rating in households and probably approaching zero young adults.

Sunday Ratings:  But there is nothing like the NFL.  Dominant ratings across the board and near-perfect regionalization.  On Sunday, CBS had the single game (usually one game in each market in the 1:00 pm ET window or occasionally in the 4:00 pm ET window if a Western team is hosting the game), while FOX had the doubleheader.

On CBS, its single game averaged a 10.5 household rating and 22 share across the 56 metered markets.  The 10.5 rating for CBS is made up of six different games in six different regions (mainly the Denver-Carolina game but also significant chunks of the country seeing Jets-Seattle or Oakland-Baltimore).

Over on FOX, the early game averaged a very similar 10.6 rating and 22 share, while the late game scored a 14.6 rating and 26 share (mostly the Dallas-Philadelphia game but also the St Louis-San Francisco game in six of the metered markets).   These numbers are fairly typical for an NFL Sunday afternoon.

Of course, sports, like politics, is local — and sports ratings are usually very concentrated in local markets or regions.  The most extreme example of this is on Saturday was the Birmingham, Alabama market for the CBS game at 3:30: a near-Super Bowl level of a 47.5 household rating (yes, almost half of all homes in the market watched the Crimson Tide lose) and 70 share (more than two-thirds of the homes with TV sets on were watching).   The other home markets are not so extreme but still illustrate a significant skew.

The most rabid local NFL fans on Sunday afternoon were found in New Orleans (almost a 47 HH rating and 69 share) and to a lesser extent Denver and Minneapolis (around a 35 rating and 65 share).  Most NFL markets are “only” in the 40s or 50s share level for their team’s games, an unbelievably strong base to built a league’s television ratings.  New York clearly favors the Giants (15.6 rating / 34 share at 1:00 pm) over the Jets (10.5 /20 at 4:00 pm), but keep in mind a 10 rating or 20 share would be considered a mega-hit in any time period on any network.