You won't believe these football ratings! Has college football become a top ratings powerhouse?

Fitzy joins! You won't believe these football ratings! Has college football become a top ratings powerhouse?

Transcript

00:00My lead this morning is this. I'm not sure, Shyam, if you happen to have seen the ratings

00:04that came out over the weekend for the first round of the college football playoffs. None of the

00:10games were particularly compelling or that interesting. As a matter of fact, we pretty

00:14much had four blowouts as we anticipated because they expanded from four games to 12 games.

00:20I thought maybe making their way to eight, but they wanted to get as many teams involved as

00:24possible. Maybe they'll scale it back eventually. Anyway, long story short, as we around here

00:30romance and obsess over our other three major North American sporting clubs, the Boston Celtics,

00:36the Boston Bruins, and the Boston Red Sox, we need to remember that on the grand scale,

00:41nationally speaking, baseball, basketball, and hockey respectively are almost niche sports in

00:48the face of football because these games, SMU at Penn State, six and a half million viewers,

00:55Clemson at Texas, nine million viewers, Indiana at Notre Dame on Friday night, not even remotely a

01:02competitive football game, 13 and a half million viewers, and Saturday night, Tennessee at Ohio

01:08State, 14 and a half million viewers. All of these games, none of them competitive as well.

01:15All of these games drew bigger ratings than your NBA finals, your Stanley Cup finals, your World

01:21Series. Football is king and football is king by so far away in this country that even the college

01:28football opening round playoffs, which were decidedly lopsided, drew bigger numbers.