Matt Cassel
It may have been one of the ugliest football games played in recent NFL history, but the Kansas City Chiefs 16-13 overtime loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers on Monday Night Football still proved to be a Nielsen ratings success for KMBC and ESPN.
As the 1-8 Chiefs were embarrassing themselves nationally with an ill-advised touchdown celebration (link to Huffington Post story), KMBC still notched a strong 19.1 rating* and 27 share** for the game after buying the rights from ESPN to broadcast the game.
ESPN logged a 15.2/22 for the game.
Even KMBC’s “Chiefs Tailgate” special, which featured an expanded interview with Chiefs’ GM Scott Pioli that aired last week, drew an 8.4 rating/22 share. ABC’s first half hour of Dancing With the Stars, which KMBC moved to KCWE, drew an 8.0/21.
* A rating tells how many people watched a particular TV program; it is the percent of households or persons within a universe (all TV households, or adults 18-49, for example) who are tuned to a particular program or daypart.
**A share expresses this same number of viewers as a percent of only the households or persons actually watching television during the program or daypart. Thus, a share is a percent of a constantly changing number — the number of homes or number of persons in a given demographic using television at that time.
MNF: YUCK
I haven’t watched MNF since it went to ESPN (unless the Chiefs were on it and I could watch it without cable).
Watched the game last night. Yuck! Way, way, way too many commercials in the first half of the game. It seemed like there were about 50% more commercials in the first half than are shown in the first half of a game shown on Sunday or Thursday.
And Jon Gruden? Please. Someone needs to introduce this guy to the English language. My favorite line of his was when, after pointing out that a Chiefs player correctly protested a holding call, he said, “I can’t say that I don’t disagree with him.”
My highlight was a commercial that showed an old lady being found in her house after falling in her shower. However, right in the middle of that commercial it cut away to a girl singing a 5-Hour Energy jingle.
DESCRIBING CHIEFS GAME?
I didn’t watch any of the game on TV and listened to only some of it on the radio. Would the contest be best described as a comedy or a tragedy, or perhaps a little of both?