Austin360 blogs > TV Blog > Archives > 2006 > January > 05
Thursday, January 5, 2006
Rose Bowl’s blockbuster ratings!
Austin, we have a blockbuster!
More people in Central Texas watched the Longhorns win the Rose Bowl than watched last year’s Super Bowl.
According to local overnight Nielsen ratings provided by ABC affiliate KVUE, Wednesday’s championship game between the University of Texas Longhorns and the University of Southern California Trojans racked up a 48 rating and a 74 share.
That means about half a million people in our 13-county viewing area watched UT quarterback Vince Young single-handedly bring home the trophy with his last-minute touchdown. And that 500,000 doesn’t even include group gatherings in homes and bars, of which there were many.
Last year’s Super Bowl, won by the New England Patriots, pulled in about 470,000 Central Texas viewers.
Last year’s Rose Bowl — which also featured a Longhorns victory but not for the national championship — had a 35 rating and a 63 share locally. That was a Saturday afternoon game, which is traditionally a smaller audience than prime time.
National ratings were not Austin-caliber strong but they were strong, beating the combined five-network competition with a 21.7 rating and an estimated 35,713,000 viewers. That’s a 58 percent increase over ratings for last year’s national championship game at the Orange Bowl (which USC won).
What did Central Texans watch last night if they were not tuned into the Rose Bowl? Not much. The second-most watched program of the night, with a tiny 5.2 rating, was a rerun of NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
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