Insight Bowl ranked 19th of 35 bowls in TV ratings

Hey, it's a slow time for sports news where I live.

I always enjoy seeing how many people watch the games I cover. Why? Because that makes me both a voyeur and a participant. That wasn't worded the way I intened. Never mind.

The Insight Bowl -- Iowa's win over Missouri if you've forgotten -- came in 19th of the 35 games in TV eyeballs as the Wiz of Odds' excellent chart shows us.

I'm a little surprised it did that well given it was a 10 p.m. start on the night before a work day in the Eastern time zone. Few other games had that double-whammy.

The bowl that shocked me with its low number was the Gator, Michigan against Mississippi State. Only seven bowls had fewer viewers.

People overwhelmingly chose the Capital One (Alabama-Michigan State) and Outback (Florida-Penn State), which were held at roughly the same time as the Gator.

The Outback, on ABC, came in a strong fourth. It was the only bowl on ABC this bowl season, which tells me there are still a lot of people in America who don't get cable TV. Really, Penn State-Florida? This year?

But the Capital One was on ESPN (the Gator was on ESPN2) and did twice the business the Gator did.

Bowl ratings were down 9 percent overall from the year before. That's partly because ESPN pried the BCS games from Fox. The Insight Bowl was up 460 percent from the previous year, though, mainly because it moved from the NFL Network to ESPN.

The Beef O'Brady's Bowl and GoDaddy.com Bowl had better ratings than the Gator.

Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany may want to rethink this business of playing three (four, counting the earlier-starting TicketCity Bowl, which Nielsen didn't even rate because it was on ESPNU) Big Ten bowls at the same time on Jan. 1.

Then again, if Delany isn't rethinking Legends-Leaders and the league's new logo, he may not be able to change his mind about anything.