Sports

I’m a big sports fan. This time of year, with baseball playoffs and the NFL under way is maybe the best time of the year. Throw in college football, and there’s a temptation to kill half the weekend in front of the tube. I understand the popularity of sports in America. I get it that almost sixteen million people watched Monday Night Football. (www.tvbythenumbers.com)

But what I’m dying to know is how many people in the New York metropolitan area, where I live, watched either Northern Iowa vs Missouri State or Idaho vs Northern Illinois. Both games were available here. I figure that fewer than the sixteen million who watched MNF could even find any of the four represented states on a map. I guesstimate that about nineteen people from this area went to Northern Illinois, so they were glued to the TV. Throw in a few parents and cousins of students in Missouri and about sixteen degenerate gamblers who figured Idaho couldn’t miss with the point spread and I think the total viewership must have been about three hundred, and I’m being generous. What mostly intrigued me is the finances of the broadcast. Logic would dictate that airing these type of shows week after week makes more money than , say, a test pattern. But I don’t think by much.

By Sam DelPresto