There is no better bellwether than this year’s BCS National Championship between Oklahoma and Florida. Last night’s FedEx BCS National Championship received a 15.8 rating, up 16% from last year’s game.

In the metered markets, Oklahoma City had the highest local rating, with 51.7% of the Sooners’ home DMA tuning into the game. Five local Florida markets also made the top ten, led by Jacksonville with a 40.2 local rating.

Top 10 Local Markets HH Rating 1/8/09
BCS National Championship

Market	HH Rating
Oklahoma City	51.7
Tulsa	46.9
Birmingham	41.6
Jacksonville	40.2
Tampa-St. Pete (Sarasota)	32.3
Orlando-Daytona Bch-Melbrn	30.6
Austin	29.9
West Palm Beach-Ft. Pierce	29.5
Ft. Myers-Naples	28.2
Source: 2009 The Nielsen Company

Viewership for the other four BCS bowls was also up compared to last year. The Fiesta Bowl between Ohio State and Texas was up 40%, the Sugar Bowl was up 14%, and viewership for the Rose Bowl increased 8%.

Outside the BCS, the positive trend continued with 17 of 27 bowls outperforming last year’s ratings.  Most notable were four bowl games airing on ESPN that boasted triple-digit increases in viewership:

• The Humanitarian Bowl between Maryland and Nevada was seen by 3 million viewers, a whopping 218% increase over last year’s game.
• The Hawaii Bowl was proof that Notre Dame still can still deliver a large audience (and a victory),  in front of 4.4 million viewers up 119% over last year’s game.
• The Poinsettia Bowl on Dec.23  and the GMAC Bowl on Jan. 6 showed that there is demand for Bowls well before and after New Year’s, sporting 115% and 113% increases in viewers, respectively.

Below is a full recap of national viewers for this year’s bowl games.

The NHL is hoping old acquaintances will provide an unforgettable New Year’s Day in its second annual Winter Classic. The Detroit Red Wings and Chicago Blackhawks – two of the original six hockey teams – will drop the puck outdoors at historic Wrigley Field- home to baseball’s Chicago Cubs.

Last year’s inaugural outdoor game provided a memorable tableaux, with Pittsburgh’s Sidney Crosby carving through the Buffalo snow to score the winning goal in an overtime shootout in front of the NHL’s largest regular season television audience since Wayne Gretzky’s retirement in 1999.

If the NHL hopes to top last year’s Winter Classic, it certainly has the conditions in its favor. The Red Wings won the Stanley Cup last year in a series that was the leagues highest-rated in five years. This season, the Red Wings average a 3.5 local household rating in Detroit (aka “Hockeytown, USA”) - third among all NHL clubs.

The Blackhawks, meanwhile, are more than doubling their average audience in Chicago over last season with an average 1.2 household rating and 43,000 household viewers.  They’re also leading the league in attendance, thanks in part to their nine-game winning streak riding into Wrigley. And with the forecast calling for a 30% chance of snow in the Windy City Thursday, the scene may well be as visually pleasing as last year’s Classic.

The programming window for the NHL’s Winter Classic is helped in part by the Bowl Championship Series’s decision within the last decade to move three bowl games off New Year’s Day. The National Championship Game, as it has since 2007, airs a full week after the first of the year, with this year’s contest between the Florida Gators and the Oklahoma Sooners kicking off January 8 on FOX.

Nevertheless, college football continues to dominate New Year’s Day television with a slate of bowl games across four networks.  Last year’s Rose Bowl on ABC was seen by over 19 million viewers, tops for any program on New Year’s Day.  The top 6 most-viewed sports programs of New Year’s Day were all bowl games, followed by the Winter Classic.