Sunday Night game: I think that Jerry Jones put the Bush Family Curse on the stadium by having Dubya out there for the coin toss. That’s why they lost.
They’re calling the new stadium “Jerryworld”. I think they should call it “Jonestown”. I think Chris Collinsworth even made some joke about “who’s drinking the Kool-aid”?
Granted, that will require the ‘Boys to have a winning season, or at the very best, undefeated at home. Or maybe that’s part of the curse??? Wait and see…
Here’s a joke: The previous NFL attendance record was in Mexico City during an exhibition game. They unofficially stated that Cowboys’ Stadium has broken that record with an attendance of 105,121 people. How?
All the Mexicans came to Texas.
Oh, and Jerry even hired *cage dancers *for the concourse. Tell me this man doesn’t know how to make money.
Tonight’s game: Jon Gruden, if we ask real nice and pay you endorsements, could you *please *say the word “wildcat” a few more times. Pleeeeease?
…Sheesh…
Well that hardly seems fair. A team leading TOP by 3:1 and loses. I wonder if that’s ever happened before.
Their play the end of either half was pretty terrible though. They could’ve scored a TD to close out the first half, and they could’ve gave themselves a better chance to win at the end.
They have to give it to Ricky occasionally to keep defenses from keying on Brown. Every time they faked to Ricky on the outside run a defender went with him; that’s what made space for Brown.
It’s certainly clear that Brown is a much better back, though (and has been since 2007).
For the record, the attendance record was set during a regular season game, not an exhibition - between the (then) woeful 49ers and Cardinals. Last night’s game set a US attendance record but didn’t break the Mexico City record.
Not since 1975 or so when they started keeping TOP as an official statistic.
Yeah, I saw that on SNY Sportsdesk this morning. Pretty cool.
I was going to use this as a cite, which lists the top 5 rated SNF games since the current format was adopted 3-4 years ago:
9/20/09, Giants-Cowboys, 16.5/27
11/25/07, Eagles-Patriots, 15.6/24
12/14/08, Giants-Cowboys, 15.4/24
11/5/06, Colts-Patriots, 15.1/22
9/10/06, Colts-Giants, 14.7/23 (“Manning Bowl”)
Four of the top five games involved at least one NFC East team, and two of them were NFC East rivalry games. Clearly, NFC East teams draw big.
Here is the equivalent article for last week’s season opener between the Bears and Packers. (Rated well; up 3% from last year’s opener.)
Most interesting to me is the market breakdowns in both those articles. Apparently only 19.3% of televisions in New York watched the Giants play, while 34.8% of televisions in Chicago tuned in to watch the Bears. Put another way, Chicago provided the #1 most avid watchers of Bears-Packers, while NYC was only the 13th most avid watchers of Giants-Cowboys, behind Noew Orleans, Denver, and Nashville, among others. Even DC had a higher percentage of viewers than NYC, so the idea that even division rivals would rather watch someone else is shaky at best.
It sounds logical to dismiss the Giants as a nationwide draw simply because the New York market is so large so they alone could move the needle when the rest of the country doesn’t care. But based on the ratings, this idea appears to be false.
Plugging in total population for televisions in the above ratings, we get:
600k is far too small a margin to move the national needle. Because the Giants seem to rate so much higher than the Bears, I can only conclude that they are a larger draw outside New York than the Bears are outside Chicago.
It might have something to do with the fact that NFC East teams are IN four of every five games on Sunday Night Football. (I exaggerate, but probably not by much). Obviously I don’t own a TV station, but I’d like to see some more variety; I’m pretty damned sick of the NFC East always being on my TV.
If I had to vote for the NFL MVP right now, it would be a tough call between Drew Brees and Darrelle Revis. That guy shut down Andre Johnson in week one and Randy Moss in week two. He’s really impressed me.
Um, let’s neglect that the Bears play the Packers in the smallest market in the country. While the Giants play the Cowboys, presumably a top 5 market.
The Bears-Packers ratings drew from a wide variety of cities. The Giants-Dallas game drew 8 of the 15 top ratings from cities with strong ties to the Giants or Cowboys (and another 3 from Redskins markets). The top 4 were all Cowboy markets.
Where do you get that 600K is not significant? It’s almost exactly 3% of the total viewership from last weeks Bears-Packers game. That’s the difference of several slots on the rankings board.
The fact that the NY market is a comparatively poor football market supports your claim that the Giants are nationally favored how? That the NYC market is so big that such a weak proportion still leaves it on top of the #3 market by 60% pretty profoundly kills that argument. As a matter of fact the Giants-Dallas game’s record ratings seem to emphasize that the Cowboys are a huge local draw as are the Giants. Were one to add up all the ratings from Cowboy markets and New York markets and I bet they’d make up a much, much higher proportion of the overall viewership than the Packers-Bears. Probably by a factor of 2 to 1.
No, it’s because they all reside in huge markets. Period.
If you could prove that a higher percentage of people in say, Seattle, were watching NFC East games than other non-NFC West matchups then you might be able to support the argument that people are interested in these games above others.
I had thought that was going to be a matter of faulty perception, but that’s not really the case. NFC East teams really are involved in quite a few Sunday Night games.
Wikipedia has a chart breaking it down for the NBC era, but the numbers are a little skewed. They have it as follows:
NBC (2006, 2007 & 2008 seasons)
NFC East - 23
AFC West - 18
AFC South - 14
AFC North - 11
NFC North - 10
AFC East - 8
NFC South - 6
NFC West- 6
However, they’re including every prime-time game on NBC, not just SNF. It includes playoff games as well, which will certainly skew the numbers. Also, it does not take into account if it is one or two NFC East teams in a single game.
Because of this, I broke it down myself to juts deal with regular season Sunday night games:
2006 – 15 SNF games, 6 involving NFC East teams
2007 – 16 SNF games, 7 involving NFC East teams
2008 – 16 SNF games, 7 involving NFC East teams
All told, thats 47 SNF Games, and 20 of them had at least one NFC East team – just over 45%. So I guess you have a right to be sick of seeing them ('course, it’s terrific for those of us who have a team in the division :)).
Someone more interested in this than I can total up the results for the ESPN era.
Which is as it should be, since the NFC East has more playoff contenders than other divisions. Flex scheduling was introduced in 2006. Since 2006, the NFC East has supplied 5 of the 6 NFC wildcard teams. Because the stated purpose of flex scheduling is to get more matchups with playoff implications, of course the NFC East is over-represented. What are they going to show, a Lions game?
Yes, Revis is an astonishingly good cover guy. I picked Asante Samuel to win defensive POTY before the season but I can’t rightly argue that anyone other than Revis should win it right now.
Maybe Antwaan Odom of the Bengals and his 7 sacks, but I doubt he can sustain that sort of production.
Yeah, no kidding. I decided against picking up Andre Johnson in the salary cap league after week 1 because it looked like he and Schaub were terrible. Turns out that was just an illusion caused by Revis and the Jets.
I remember back in 2007 when he and Aaron Ross both got drafted right near each other in the first round. Revis didn’t look so hot in his rookie season, while Ross was a solid contributer to the Superbowl run. I thought the Giants got the better DB.
Then in 2008, Ross started getting exposed and picked on, really starting to crumble at times. Meanwhile, Revis never got thrown at. Hmmm…
Now here it is in 2009, Revis has shut down two of the best WRs in the league in consecutive weeks to start the season, and Ross can’t even get on the field because of a bad hammy. And once he does, you just know he’s going to get picked on mercilessly.
Wish the Giants had traded Ross for Revis straight up right after the Superbowl win. Ah well, 20/20 hindsight.
Washington, D.C., 19.5/34
T13. New York, 19.3/31
T13. Charlotte, 19.3/30
Denver, 19.0/31
Dallas markets, New York markets, Redskins markets
And yes, New Orleans is a definite Cowboys market.
I don’t see a very wide distribution of interest there. Tennessee and the DC region seem over represented, the latter probably as a result NYC and Texas transplants into the Capitol area. I don’t see much love from anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon or the West Coast.
Dallas has a lot of national fans, much like the Packers and Steelers, but the bulk of the NFC East is a snooze fest for the rest of the country. For evidence I’ll offer the constant bitching here on the SDMB. Thank god for Peyton Manning and Brett Favre, otherwise we’d probably never see a non-NFC East or Patriots game in the post ESPN world.
