Jets taking off as national TV attraction
With so much hoopla surrounding the Jets this season, experts say they have become a must-watch team even for people who have no rooting interest. (Dec. 6, 2010) Credit: AP
The NFL for years has been disproving laws of television nature, from its gravity-defying ratings rises to its general disregard for market size.
Look no further than Super Bowl XLIV, in which two relatively small cities drew the biggest audience in the history of American TV.
Baseball equivalent? Well, there isn't one, unless the Triple-A New Orleans Zephyrs and Indianapolis Indians somehow advance to the World Series and set ratings records.
This helps explain why for much of Peyton Manning's career, media executives would have watched Saturday's Jets-Colts game while sticking (extra long) pins in a Rex Ryan voodoo doll.
Never mind the 7½ million homes in the New York area - more than five times Indy's total. Give TV types a big-name quarterback and they'll follow him anywhere.
All of which is a long way of getting to today's sports media lesson: J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets!
After a half-century as the second-biggest franchise in its own town and mostly as an afterthought in the rest of America, have the Jets at last become a national attraction?
"I think the answer to that is probably yes,'' CBS Sports president Sean McManus said.
"There has been so much stuff swirling around the Jets both on and off the field that I think they have generated a lot of interest outside the New York market.''
That made watching Saturday's game on NBC a low-stress experience for McManus, whose network has the remaining AFC playoff games. "We would have been fine either way,'' he said, and actually meant it.
The phenomenon has unfolded gradually, from Brett Favre's brief term in 2008 to Rex Ryan's run to the AFC title game last season to the gift-that-keeps-on-giving circus this season.
In our area, the Jets averaged 15.8 percent of homes in 2010, their highest such figure since 1997 and a rise of more than 50 percent since 2007. (The Giants averaged 15.7.)
TV Nation has caught on, too. The Jets were scheduled for only two prime-time games in each of the two years before this one (with a third "flexed" in '09), then five this season.
Now this: McManus said it often is the first game or two of the postseason that launches a team into the national consciousness, and the Jets' narrow victory over an old nemesis was a textbook case.
Next are the Patriots, whose rivalry with the Jets has turned from Yankees-Red Sox Lite to something real and spectacular.
Of course, the story of Woody's toy has not been everyone's cup of venom.
After McManus answered my question about the Jets, former Steelers coach and current CBS analyst Bill Cowher got on the phone and said that no matter what the Patriots say publicly, privately they will replay the Jets' words. "Bill Belichick will make this personal,'' he said. "He'll make his players believe it's personal. "I think I wouldn't waken a sleeping giant, and I think he may have done that.''
So what's it going to take for the Jets to win? "I don't know,'' Cowher said. "A couple of guys could maybe get in a snowstorm and don't show up to the game. That might be the only thing.''
Yikes! Maybe CBS' people are offering sharp opinions - Dan Dierdorf hammered Ryan, too - merely to help promote the big game.
So let's turn to a less invested observer from ESPN. How does fellow Super Bowl-winning quarterback Trent Dilfer think Tom Brady will react to the Jets' verbal barbs? "I think he's going to unleash hell on them,'' he said.
In other words: America, grab your remotes!
