TV Ratings Soar

The numbers are in, and the Hawaii/BSU game last Friday night was the highest viewed of all the ESPN or ESPN2 Friday night games this season. It was also ESPN2's highest share for all of 2007. Over 2 1/2 million households watched the game.

Those numbers are great for the WAC in general, and should give Karl Benson plenty of ammo when the next negotiations with ESPN come up in 2010.

The Academically Adjusted Football Rankings

Collegio (the betting software/service) recently reported an academics-adjusted Top 25.

According to Collegio:

The purpose of Sophos Software's Academically Adjusted Football Ranking is to stimulate thought and discussion about how well institutions balance winning on and off the football field. In short, how accurate is the term Student-Athlete at any given college or university? Toward such a measurement of the successful blending of the "curricular" and the "extracurricular," Sophos Software has developed a scaled metric known as the Student-Athlete Blend. This metric ranks football programs based upon their ability to succeed in athletics without sacrificing academics.

Once again, BSU is listed close to the top. According to this ranking system, here's how a few teams of interest this year fared (our opponents in bold):

# Team Football (Rating) Academics (HWD) Student-Athlete Blend
1 Stanford 14.7 103.9 74.2
2 Boise State 59.9 81.1 74.0
3 Vanderbilt 28.1 93.6 71.8
4 Boston College 46.5 82.8 70.7
5 Penn State 52.2 75.4 67.6
6 Cincinnati 55.7 73.4 67.5
7 Wake Forest 30.1 85.0 66.7
8 Nebraska 26.0 86.5 66.3
9 USF 51.2 73.0 65.7
10 Ball State 29.5 83.1 65.2
11 Ohio State 79.1 58.0 65.1
12 Texas Tech 44.2 75.4 65.0
13 Oklahoma State 34.0 79.2 64.1
14 San Diego State 20.5 85.5 63.8
15 Northwestern 26.3 82.1 63.5
16 Arizona State 54.8 67.1 63.0
17 Kansas 75.6 56.6 62.9
18 Duke 7.8 90.3 62.8
19 Clemson 58.9 64.3 62.5
20 Oregon 58.7 64.0 62.2
23 West Virginia 67.3 59.1 61.8
24 Southern Miss 27.3 78.0 61.1
30 Oregon State 34.9 69.3 57.9
31 TCU 31.5 70.7 57.7
35 USC 50.9 59.8 56.8
45 Hawaii 51.8 56.6 55.0
46 Notre Dame 7.0 79.0 55.0
53 Utah 39.8 60.6 53.7
62 Louisiana Tech 19.1 69.1 52.4
66 Washington 20.2 67.5 51.8
79 New Mexico State 19.0 63.8 48.9
81 Fresno State 30.3 57.5 48.4
96 Idaho 8.4 60.3 43.0
97 Arkansas State 20.6 53.5 42.5
98 Wyoming 25.3 51.1 42.5
101 UNLV 14.4 55.5 41.8
102 San Jose State 17.0 53.9 41.6
105 BYU 47.4 36.6 40.2
112 Nevada 26.9 38.3 34.5
114 Utah State 0.0 49.0 32.7

Not bad. Not bad at all