Outback Bowl No Ratings Winner

The Outback Bowl was watched on television by a lot of people in Iowa and South Carolina and, uh, uh, uh ...

Of the 34 bowl games, the Jan. 1 Outback Bowl ranked 17th in television viewers according to Nielsen, which knows a bit more about ratings than most of us.

The game had 4,093,000 viewers according to http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/media_entertainment/sports-wrap-college-football-bowls-over-audiences/. That's a 10 percent drop from the year before when the Outback's matchup was Tennessee-Wisconsin.

The TV audience for the Georgia-Michigan State Capital One Bowl, which started two hours after the Outback Bowl, was 10.8 million. But that was a 27 percent drop from its Michigan-Florida pairing of the year before.

These weren't great matchups for American interests.

Some of the bowls that had more viewers than the Outback, though ... hard to believe.

The Emerald Bowl was ninth of the 34 bowls. It was a game between unranked Miami and unranked California. The Wisconsin-Florida State Champs Sports Bowl had the seventh-largest audience, over 7 million viewers on the night of Dec. 27.

Go figure.

The Outback Bowl is a crummy time slot for TV (It begins at 8 a.m. on the West Coast), so you know you'll never have a huge audience no matter the matchup. It's a hangover game according to one West Coast friend of the Hlog's, someone who may have some first-hand knowledge of such things.

So if you think just because you play in a Florida bowl you'll get a lot of sweet national exposure for recruiting and merchandising, think again. If that bowl is the Outback, anyway.