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When Peyton Manning and Eli Manning meet for a regular season game, TV network executives do a little happy dance around the water cooler the next day.
Sunday Night Football," which featured Peyton and Eli Manning's NFL teams squaring off for the second time in primetime, drew a 15.2 household rating, according to Nielsen metered-market ratings, fifth-best in "SNF" history.
The game, won 38-14 by Peyton's Colts over Eli's Giants, was up 3 percent over the previous Manning Bowl in 2006, which averaged a 14.7 and also resulted in a Colts win, though a much closer one, 26-21.
It continues a big start to the year for football, with last weekend's Washington Redskins-Dallas Cowboys the highest-rated game in "SNF" history.
More and more people seem to be opting to watch football games on TV rather than attend them. It's a sign of the troubled US economy. With TV systems becoming more and more elaborate, the desire to pay small fortunes to attend games and blow even more money on over priced beer and food has lost it allure. Then again, game tickets do not drive NFL profits.
TV contracts do.