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As we teased yesterday, we’ve got plenty to say about yesterday’s Courier-Journal column that took yet another swing at the University of Kentucky for moving the Kentucky/Louisville game from Week 1 to Week 3. [In case you missed our first take on the Kentucky press’ bashing of Kentucky’s decision to move the game, you can find it here.] 

With Kentucky winning the football game, most journalists seem to have let the topic die. But not the author of yesterday’s column. In a column about Kentucky football and its coach, Rich Brooks, that was generally positive, the author couldn’t help but add the following:

The national overnight Nielsen ratings are in: The game generated a rating of .4. Mark Mandel of ESPN said that translates to about 371,000 households.

The audience for Arkansas against Alabama, which overlapped with UK-U of L for much of the night on big daddy ESPN, was six times as large. Southern California and Nebraska pulled a 5.0 on ABC.

Last season, when the UK-U of L game was played on Sunday, Sept. 3, at 8 p.m. and televised on ESPN, it generated a 1.8 rating. That game was over at halftime and still drew more than four times the audience of Saturday’s back-and-forth thriller.

That is the reason the game works better on the season’s first weekend. No competition from other college games. Considerably better national exposure.

We take issue with all of the quoted passage except the second paragraph, and now we’ll explain why.

First, the first paragraph, which notes the .4 rating. The author relies on the ESPN Classic overnight rating of .4. Evidently he’s so eager to say “told ya so” that he couldn’t wait for the final ratings. Those came out today and revealed the game had a rating of .79, making it the highest-rated program in ESPN Classic’s history. [Link] Further, it was revealed today that the final ratings don’t include the numbers for viewers watching the broadcast on Lexington’s WKYT and Louisville’s WHAS. Once those numbers are included in the rating, it’s likely that the difference between last year’s broadcast and this year’s broadcast will be only a few hundred thousand.

Of course, this would still mean that more people saw last year’s game than this year’s. But the author’s primary argument has been that Kentucky was costing itself considerable national exposure — so much exposure, in his opinion, that the lost exposure outweighed any competitive advantage gained from moving the game. If the difference between this year’s rating and last year’s is ultimately only two or three tenths of a Nielsen point, however, that argument is debunked (especially since Kentucky vindicated its decision to move the game by winning the game). 

The mention of the rating of last year’s game brings us to our second point, and the third paragraph. Here the author notes that last year’s game, played during Week 1 on Sunday in primetime and broadcast on ESPN, generated a 1.8 rating, far exceeding the rating of this year’s game. If you take it at face value, it’s hard to argue with this. But if you look at what ESPN was airing on Sunday night in Week 1, you’ll see the author is comparing apples to oranges.

His comparison assumes that this year’s game could have been broadcast on ESPN on Sunday night during Week 1. But he neglects to mention that ESPN, which entered into a lucrative contract with NASCAR to resume televising races again in 2007, was airing the Sharp AQUOS 500 from 7 p.m., and ESPN2 was airing Sunday Night Baseball from 8 p.m. So, even on Sunday night in Week 1, the Cats wouldn’t have been playing on an ESPN network available on basic cable in primetime.

The game could have been televised on ESPN or ESPN2 with an afternoon kickoff, like the 2005 game. That game, according to Street&Smith’s Sports Business Daily (which is a pay site; we don’t have a free link), had a lower rating, 1.2, than last year’s game, which isn’t surprising since it wasn’t played in primetime. It’s entirely possible that the total rating of this year’s broadcast will surpass that figure.

Then there’s the final paragraph of the quoted passage. We’ve got two issues with this paragraph. First, the author again tries to have it both ways. As we noted the first time we weighed in on this, he spent most of the summer stating the game should be played during Week 1 because there were no other big games. Then he abandoned this position on August 28 and wrote that there were several games in Week 1 that would “reshape the Top-25″ (implying that there were plenty of teams that, unlike Kentucky, didn’t need a warm-up game or two before taking on a difficult opponent). With yesterday’s column he flipped back to his original position.

So, to review, on August 28, Week 1 included several high-profile matchups presumably capable of garnering considerable national attention, including Tennessee at Cal, Georgia Tech at Notre Dame, and the latest edition of the Bowden Bowl, Florida State at Clemson. But on September 18, just three weeks later, Week 1 offered “no competition from other college games.” It’s a bit rich to suggest that Kentucky/Louisville would have been the story in Week 1 when the author is perfectly aware that several other compelling games were played in Week 1.

This brings us to our second contention with the last quoted paragraph: the elephant in the room, Appalachian State. Obviously, Kentucky vs. Louisville wasn’t the most-watched game of the Week 3, but it was the most talked about game from Saturday night through Sunday morning. Coverage of the game led off SportsCenter during that time and was the marquee story in the ESPNNews loop. Obviously, this wouldn’t have been the case in Week 1 when Appalachian State’s upset was by far the biggest story in college football.  

Another thing the column fails to mention is that playing the game in Week 3 made it a bigger victory for Kentucky. Louisville entered the season as No.10/11, but was a top-10 team in both polls in Week 3.

Oh, and the author also fails to point out that even though last year’s game was played in Week 1, there were about thirty thousand more people in attendance at this year’s game. But maybe that was just a coincidence. Honk!

To us, it certainly seems like Kentucky had its cake and ate it too. We got the win (the most important thing), and we got plenty of exposure (a nice bonus).

And since we’re not Awful Announcing, here’s hoping this is our last word on the topic (but if another stubborn columnist churns out another piece bashing Kentucky’s decision to move the game, all bets are off).  

Onward and upward!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Allenby for Heisman!, College Football, UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.