By Gabriel Spitzer

    Take heart, sports fans.
    Erosion may have been the big story of 2000 in television sports, but thanks to college football 2001 has kicked off on a positive note. Other than the Super Bowl, the college Bowl games seem to be the only event in sports whose audience isn’t shrinking.
   The four Bowl Championship Series (BCS) games scored a cumulative rating of 55.5/91, up 6 percent over last year’s household rating and an impressive 14 percent over the numbers for 1999. 
    The BCS consists of the FedEx Orange Bowl, the Nokia Sugar Bowl, the Rose Bowl presented by AT&T and the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl.
   By way of comparison, the FedEx Orange Bowl, which crowned the Oklahoma Sooners as national champs, nailed down a 17.8/28, which was 26 percent higher than the rating for the NCAA Basketball Championship game.
    The FedEx Orange Bowl also beat every one of last October’s World Series games on Fox, the best of which topped out at 15.2.
  The Orange Bowl, averaging 27.2 million viewers, was also the highest-rated national championship game in college football since 1997.
   The four-game average for the BCS, at 13.8, bested the averages of both the five-game World Series and the six games of the NBA finals.
   After the national championship game, the Rose Bowl, presented by AT&T, was the most-watched Bowl game with a 14.0 rating and a 24 share. 
    Next was the Nokia Sugar Bowl, at 13.0/21. ABC met or beat its ratings projections for all but the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, which garnered a 10.7/18.
   On each evening from January 1-3, ABC’s Bowl games led primetime in households, men 18-48, men 25-54, adults 18-48 and adults 25-54.
    Much of the credit for the brisk numbers goes to the format of the Bowl series.
   The college football championship series has gone through several incarnations, the three-year-old BCS being the latest. As viewers get used to the format, which spaces out the four marquee Bowls over three days beginning Jan. 1, viewing habits are starting to solidify.
   "They were great scheduled games, and the public has become a little more conditioned to the way the BCS system is set up. It used to be that there were so many games on New Year’s Day that you didn’t know where to go," says John Mansell, an analyst at Paul Kagan Associates.
    Lousy weather in the Northeast may have also had something to do with the Bowls’ big numbers, but Ed Erhardt, president, ESPN ABC Sports customer marketing and sales, believes that the brand ABC and sibling ESPN have been building around the BCS is the biggest factor.
    "I think the BCS has arrived in the minds of the TV viewer. It’s a crossover event; it’s bigger than just college football fans, considering that the typical rating for the regular season is a six or seven on any given Saturday," he says.
   "The way we schedule it has a lot to do with why the ratings are going up. We really showcase the games, the teams and, of course, the presenting sponsors."
    In addition to the four BCS Bowls, some 21 lesser Bowls also figure in to college football’s postseason. Of the 25 total Bowl games, Disney’s ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 broadcast 20 of them.
    On ESPN, the Bowls did slightly lower household numbers than last year, with the network’s 10 games averaging a 3.1 rating, down 5 percent from last year. But among males 18-34, the average rating was up 24 percent, from 1.82 to 2.25.
   ESPN2’s Bowls were up 17 percent in households with an average 1.48 rating, and the 1.06 in males 18-34 represents a hefty 38 percent increase over last year.
   "We’re pretty pleased with the numbers for ESPN and ESPN2. And the demo story is great, which is of course what we sell," says Erhardt.
   Selling being the name of the game, both the network and the sponsors had reason to celebrate in the wee hours of 2001. In spite of an ugly ad landscape, ABC and ESPN’s joint sales team sold out over 95 percent of the ad inventory, plus the big-dollar naming sponsorships.
   "Whatever money was in the marketplace, we got. You’re feeling good about the buy you made if you’re an advertiser, and the companies with big stakes in the BCS—FedEx, Nokia, AT&T and Tostitos—all look pretty good right now," Erhardt says.

- Gabriel Spitzer is a staff writer for Media Life.

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