While I’m still putting together notes from SEC points East and West, I thought I’d link you to an interesting story by Stewart Mandel over at SI.com.

A couple of weeks ago, much to my chagrin, I penned a piece explaining why I don’t think we’ll be able to reach a playoff for college football anytime soon.

Unfortunately, money seems to be in the way.

But the following is at least a little positive for playoff fans: the tv ratings for the three BCS bowls played so far are way down overall.

The Orange Bowl drew only a 6.1 rating for Cincinnati and Virginia Tech.  That’s a new low for a BCS bowl.  The Champs Sports Bowl (Florida State vs. Wisconsin) drew a similar audience.

The Sugar Bowl between Alabama and Utah did just a 7.8 rating.  That’s an increase over Georgia/Hawaii last year, but still very low.

The Rose Bowl did it’s usual 12ish rating.

The drop in ratings ties directly to the creation of a fifth BCS game (the BCS Championship Game was taken out of a bowl and made its own game) in order to appease the small, non-BCS conference schools who were threatening legal action.

Will falling ratings lead to a playoff?  Not anytime soon.  ESPN has already spent $500 million on the BCS package for four upcoming years… so the decline in ratings (and ad revenue) is their problem.

But if the BCS ratings continue to drop — for ALL the BCS bowls — then you might seen a monetary advantage in moving from the bowl system to a playoff system.

Just don’t count it.  I’m guessing the ratings for the BCS’ big games (OSU/Texas, USC/Penn State, and Florida/Oklahoma this year) will continue to do well for years to come.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 9:17 am and is filed under Alabama, Homepage . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.