Idle musings on America's most watched shows.

Okay, let's see if I have this right.

Ignore for a second that the Sports Business Daily has made an article available free if only briefly. This (courtesy Fang's Bites) is a list of the highest-rated programs so far this year. The only programs to get more than 24.8 million viewers are the Oscars and episodes of American Idol.

(Does anyone know of any other programs to get into that range that come later in the year that aren't sports?)

So, let's take the Super Bowl's rating of 42.0, divide it by its number of viewers (98,732,000), then multiply by the lowest number of viewers on the list to establish the cutoff, and we get a rating of 10.5.

Wait... the lowest-rated sports event on the list is the Ravens-Titans playoff game. Which got a 15.4 rating. Ravens-Dolphins should have also gotten on the list at 15.0, as should have Cardinals-Panthers, Falcons-Cardinals, the Rose Bowl, the college basketball championship game, and depending on relative positioning, the Super Bowl Pregame Show.

Okay, let's try the conference championship games. Try the AFC Title Game. That last place episode of Idol should have gotten a 13.4. That still doesn't account for the three NFL Playoff games I mentioned. The NFC title game? By those standards, the lowest rating should be 14.1. Still doesn't account for Ravens-Dolphins.

Okay, let's zip down to Ravens-Titans. Well, this makes more sense: a 15 even, evidently with more viewers than Ravens-Dolphins. Still, evidently rating/viewers is not a constant and there's a bit more that goes into the formulae... which could be a problem if I want to work with that sort of thing.

(Although at the very bottom it says the ratings are Live + Same Day. Are those not the same numbers as the final ratings? How useful is that?)