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Monday, January 01, 2001

Ratings are, in a word, overrated. They are the vote-recount litigation of the televised sports kingdom, worthy of one big yawn. They are so dissected and distorted and professionally spun that dizzy critics jerk their knees and leap to conclusions.

Allow me to set the national-ratings record straight:

We aren't watching like we used to.

Ratings are down almost everywhere. The Olympics. The World Series. "Monday Night Football." The NBA. Only a handful of sporting events can boast an audience that grew slightly or remained stable the past year: NASCAR, the Super Bowl and Jerry Springer, who still is the best fight matchmaker on the pugilistic planet. Only one sport saw a marked audience increase -- golf. Because in America 2000, which now seems like a millennium ago, the only surefire way to get sports viewers to tune in was to show Tiger Woods.

If Fox could've gotten Tiger into a fairway fight with a gopher while being pursued by cops, oh, man, imagine the boffo ratings from that episode of When Animals Attack PGA Golfers During a Wild Police Chase. ... Just be thankful the network no longer controls NHL rights, otherwise it might make Mario Lemieux glow.

Anyway, the reason for droopy ratings isn't so much NBC's Olympic over-packaging, baseball's slow waltz, Dennis Miller or a lack of Michael Jordan. It's us. It's the general nonviewing public.

TV types keep tossing out the male 18- to 45-year-old audience, how the numbers for that segment keep rising. Interestingly, that also is the group that spends as much time online as tuned into the tube, according to surveys. So, if you fall into this category, you're doing your sports media job (although a lay therapist might diagnose you as needing to get a life).

Rather, the lack of sports viewership falls on the rest -- women, children, folks middle-aged or over.

What are you people doing? Reading? Studying? Watching something of more intrinsic value on the other 500 channels? Working to better mankind?

I don't blame you. Because if you refuse to boycott high ticket prices and escalating salaries and boorish behavior, you can at least register a vote in this jock democracy by clicking away. Go ahead and do something more constructive than watching TV sports -- but don't become one of those dizzy critics who whine about them.

For example, take "Monday Night Football." Once again, its season ratings drooped from a 13.7 to a 12.7, yet it still remains the most-watched prime-time show on American TV. It wasn't the fault of Boomer Esiason or the production team that ratings fell in 1999. It wasn't the fault of a reconfigured booth and splashy graphics that they fell again this season. And if anybody tuned out because of Miller's mouth, you're a dolt ... simply because you missed the most enthralling slate of contests in memory.

ABC's franchise show got to broadcast some classic games this season -- Denver-St. Louis, St. Louis-Tampa Bay, Minnesota-Green Bay come to mind. And that Dolphins-Jets contest was the "Gone With The Wind" of sports, a riveting 41/2 hours where alarm clocks should have awoken us from slumber, TV remotes should have clicked on automatically and Craftmatic beds should have propelled us upright so all of Football America could have witnessed the fantastic, post-midnight finish. Say what you want about Miller, Al Michaels and Dan Fouts (although only Eric Dickerson deserves your bile), but the microphoned players and the snazzy graphics and the improved production gave viewers the best sports show available. Still, fewer and fewer folks watched.

It's on us. We, generally speaking, don't seem to care as much anymore. So let's leave the criticism and the ratings talk to the suits who do care -- advertisers and TV types. Just watch, if you want.

Scholastic radio return

The Nauticom Sports Network last week went the way of many Internet startups -- another crash and burn along the information superhighway. Yet this was a grand plan that started even before Western Pennsylvania high school sports went online audio. And it is a grand plan that figures to return to the local radio airwaves.

Alex Panormios, the director of sports broadcasting fired along with roughly 22 others Thursday after compiling Nauticom losses, expects to restore what was once the Scholastic Sports Network. This time, he aims to name it RedZoneSports.com, a network that will air various WPIAL and City League football games/athletic events over the radio (as SSN once did) plus on the Internet (as NSN did the past two years). He will meet with local radio-station officials this week about reviving the grand plan, starting next football season, if not sooner.

"I still think it's a great idea," said Panormios, whose regional format lost Nauticom money when it went national -- into eastern Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and Florida. "I think it works locally. When I ran it as Scholastic Sports, we always made money. High school football is an emotional buy here; it sold well. When you try to spread so quick nationally, it's tough to sell that way. That's what I'm going to try to do, recreate it locally and continue to build upon it.

"We will be around next fall. I'm just not sure in what form right now. But I'd still like to keep all 20-something stations involved next year. I've already talked to a few. I want to keep it going, because I think it's a great thing. Western Pennsylvania loves high school football."

Chuck Finder can be reached at cfinder@post-gazette.com.