One of the featured stories at the AOL Fanhouse bears this headline:
“CBS Selection Sunday Show: More Popular Than the NBA”
One can only imagine the spastic convulsions of joy that brought to so many of the NBA bashers that lurk in the swamp that is the Fanhouse comments section.
The blog post itself:
“Now here’s a fact I didn’t know: The CBS Selection Sunday show draws higher ratings than any NBA game outside the Finals.
That’s just incredible to me. We’re not talking about a broadcast of a game, we’re just talking about a broadcast of an announcement of which teams will play in some games in a few days. And yet Jim Nantz and Billy Packer draw more viewers than Shaq or Kobe or LeBron.”
Wrong. While the selection show draws a relatively huge 4.6 rating (just over half of the 8.4 the BCS selection show drew on FOX earlier this year), it does not outrate every NBA game prior to the Finals.
Blogger Michael David Smith cites this Jim Nantz statement in a Richard Dietsch SI.com piece: “Now [the Selection Show] will generate a bigger rating than any NBA game until they get to the NBA Finals.” Nantz did not specify any factual truths in his statement — it was essentially a generality, a statement assumed to be true, like ‘Paris Hilton has an STD’. Now it’s being assumed as fact, even though it is completely incorrect.
Two of the ten pre-Finals playoff games on ABC drew ratings of 6.1 and 5.5 (Cleveland/Detroit Game 7 and Detroit/Miami Game 4). Several playoff games drew higher ratings on cable as well. The Eastern Conference Finals on ESPN drew a 4.8 average cable rating, including the two highest rated basketball games, college or pro, in ESPN history (Games 5 and 6, which drew ratings of 5.5 and 5.4, respectively). Even excluding cable ratings, Game 7 of the Spurs/Mavericks series on TNT still drew a 4.7 national rating (and a 5.7 cable rating).
The Selection Show gets a very large rating, and that is a testament to college basketball’s popularity. But it is not dominating the NBA quite as much as the league’s detractors would like. Of course, considering the traffic that the Fanhouse and SI.com get compared to this blog, the vast majority of sports observers are still going to come away thinking that an hour-long selection show beats every NBA game until the Finals.
But that’s no surprise; when it comes to making the NBA look bad, the facts are never necessary.
Cable ratings measure the percentage of people with access to a cable network (in this case, ESPN or TNT) who tuned into a given show, in contrast to national ratings, which measure the percentage of the entire TV population that tuned into a program.
