Sportsfrog.com

Why?

3.6 rating for ND games on NBC in 2005
3.0 for the 2006 games
1.9 last year

Now I am no Nielsen guru, but are not ratings supposed to be getting larger to justify buying back into programming? So, why then?

“When Notre Dame is good, and they’re often quite good, they bring more attention to football than anyone else,” Ken Schanzer, the president of NBC Sports, said by telephone.

Schanzer has a son and a daughter at Notre Dame. The eldest son of Dick Ebersol, the chairman of NBC Sports, is a graduate. “We like them to be great,” Schanzer said. “It’s better when they’re great, but when they’re good, they maintain a high level of interest.” The Rev. John I. Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame, said in an interview that NBC’s decision to renew the deal well before it was required to shows “that they’re committed to a long-term relationship, not a short-term calculation about viewers and ratings.”

He said the network “understands that we’re a university, not a football franchise.”

As for that last part: BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

Yeah, that’s why NBC is getting out of its millions, the chance to be associated with the University. Dear lord, but that shit is funny. Thanks Father. Good stuff. I look forward to the NBC block of programming of ND students walking to class or heading to the library to study.

As for Schanzer’s italicized quote above, how about when they are bad? How’s the interest then? Oh, wait, it’s only a 1.9.

Swizzle. Another five years of rooting like hell against Notre Dame on a weekly basis. Nice to have some consistency in life.

And, I can take comfort in knowing that humiliations like this:

will continue to get maximum embarrassing exposure.