Bigfoot, Ken Griffey Jr. and the ghost of Jimi Hendrix could have carried an NBA team back into Seattle Sunday, and there’s a very good chance no one would have noticed.
Nearly 87 percent of all televisions that were on in the Seattle market were tuned to the end of the Seahawks-Falcons game, according to the Seattle Times.
The game drew a 45.6 rating and a 79 share (the percentage of televisions in use) for the entire game, translating to nearly 1.5 million viewers in the Seattle-Tacoma area.
“It was beyond our expectations,” said Jeremy Dietz, research director at KCPQ. “The last couple of weeks of the season the numbers started spiking. These playoff games were way higher than anything we’ve seen in a long time.”
Dietz said the ratings were the highest of any television program since the Seahawks lost in the Super Bowl to the Steelers in 2006, a game which drew a 54.4 rating and 85 share.
The Seahawks fans were apparently more into the game than Falcons fans as well. In Atlanta, the game drew an overall rating of 39.7 with a 64 share, climbing to a 48.1 rating and a 71 share by the end of the game.
Given the Seahawks’ surge in the standings this year, and a tendency toward exciting finishes, their popularity isn’t a surprise — though those ratings are extreme for any market, for any team.
