UM vs. OSU only drew a 13.4

[Jeff Gluck]

Hey Olsen, I wouldn't normally do this but your trolling has brought out my inner Irish hater.

I was up in the stands at the game and I can tell you the USC fans were plenty secure in the victory long before the onside kick. So were the Notre Dame fans, who started leaving with 9:00 on the clock. I happily took pictures of them on their way out...priceless (I'm an anti-fanboy, with severe dislike for Notre Dame thanks to fans such as yourself).

By the way, good thing Weis watched every single one of USC's offensive and defensive plays this year, had his team practice for USC for three weeks and said he started strategizing for the game a year ago. And that's what he came up with?

Maybe he should have kept going for it on fourth down to be consistent. What a genius!

By the way, it looked from the stands like the outfit he was wearing was a gray tent someone bought from a sporting goods store, cut a hole for the head and put it over him.

My favorite moment of the night was when the ND was down big late in the game and USC fans started chanting for Rudy. By that time, the Notre Dame sections were almost completely empty.

 

[GB-Hack]

This Charlie Weis fawning has got to stop.

"He's doing a helluva job with talent that wouldn't start at most other places."

It's just pitiful.

 

[GB-Hack]

I have to assume he means members of the defensive secondary when he talks about lack of talent, but still....Give Weis Georgia Tech or Wake Forest, and he wouldn't be in the ACC championship game tomorrow.

He's a good coach, but not the second coming.

 

[zaphod]

Math check:

In Oct. 2005, <a href="http://http://216.109.125.130/search/cache?p=usc+notre+dame+30+million+tv+viewers&prssweb=Search&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-501&x=wrt&u=www.sportingnews.com/cfootball/articles/20051019/664105-p.html&w=usc+notre+dame+30+million+tv+viewers&d=BNRnIpIFNgHC&icp=1&.intl=us">AP says</a> the SC-ND game "earned a 6.7 national rating," which it said translated to 30 million viewers.

In Nov. 2006, only 13 months later, <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/football/ncaa/11/19/ohiostate.michigan.ap/index.html?eref=si_latest">AP reported</a> that the OSU-UM game "pulled in a 13.4 rating, which translates to. . . 21.77 million viewers."

This does not compute. How can a rating in 2006 that is exactly twice the magnitude of the 2005 equate to fewer viewers? Did America lose half its population?

 

[GB-Hack]

Already went into this on previous pages.....

 

[zaphod]

No, actually, this point has not been addressed on previous pages. Parts of it have. No one has detected the disconnect, though buckweaver has come closest. Everyone is screaming at Jimmy Olson, but somewhere, probably at AP, an apple is being compared with an orange.

Jimmy Olson started by saying the OSU-UM game drew 21.77 million viewers, compared to 30 million who watched the 2005 ND-USC game. JO did not bring ratings figures into it, at first.

Others jumped in, said nothing about viewership numbers and pointed out that the OSU-UM game got a rating of 13.4, which is twice the rating of the SC-ND game of a year earlier, and told JO to stick it.

This went back and forth, with JO saying "30m > 21.8m" and others (primarily buckweaver) retorting with "13.4 > 6.7," yadda yadda. There was much bantering about why the viewership of the OSU-UM game was perhaps underrepresented because so many watched the game in bars, and why the SC-ND game the following week got an even higher rating, etc.

So we are left with this:

On the one side, Jimmy fanboy concedes the ratings for the 2005 SC-ND game were half the ratings of the 2006 OSU-UM game, yet persists, even after buckweaver pointed out the ratings difference, that more people watched SC-ND in 2005 than watched OSU-UM in 2006. Jimmy, here's news: It's mathematically impossible for both of these propositions to be true.

On the other side, JO's many detractors assert the ratings for the OSU-UM game were twice the ratings of the 2005 SC-ND game, yet no one has challenged JO's assertion that fewer people watched the OSU-UM game than watched the 2005-SC-ND game (The closest anyone has come is buckweaver, who has pointed out the ratings difference. Perhaps this was meant to suffice). Yet This, too, is mathematically impossible -- unless tens of millions of American households have disappeared during the past 12 months.

The source of this incompatible info is AP. In 2005, AP reported the SC-ND game got a 6.7 rating and 30 million viewers. A year later, AP reported OSU-UM pulled a 13.4 rating and 21.77 million viewers. Again, not possible. Someone botched a translation somewhere.

Jimmy Olson has seized upon the two viewership numbers, one of which cannot be accurate if the ratings figures are correct. There's every chance that AP overstated the viewership that a 6.7 rating yielded in 2005, and fanboy will have to face the fact that maybe more people watched the OSU-UM game in 2006 than watched his beloved Irish a year earlier.

Or there's a chance the viewership numbers reported by AP are correct, and one of the two ratings figures is wrong.

My bet is that Jimmy is on the wrong side of the numbers.

Let's assume AP got the ratings figures correct: 6.7 for USC-ND in October 2005, and 13.4 for OSU-UM in 2006. For the 2005-06 season, one Nielsens ratings point was equivalent to about 1.1 million U.S. households. Thus, a 6.7 rating would translate to about 7.4 million households. To get to 30 million viewers for the 2005 SC-ND game, you'd need roughly 4 people per household watching.
A 13.4 rating for the 2006 OSU-UM game equates to about 14 million households. You'd need fewer than two people per household to get to 21.77 million viewers.
The OSU-UM scenario seems far more likely to me.