February 5, 2003
No. 363

SUPER GRUDEN (LITERALLY) RINGS THE BELL!

Super Bowl XXXVII-winning coach JON GRUDEN accepted the New York Stock Exchange’s invitation to ring the opening bell on Wall Street today (2/5) in recognition of his Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ 48-21 victory over the Oakland Raiders in San Diego 11 days earlier.

Other significant notes and statistics regarding a memorable Super Bowl include:

• ON NATIONAL TV:  Super Bowl XXXVII was the second most-watched program in television history.  All of the 10 most-watched shows in TV history are Super Bowls.  The game drew 137.7 million viewers, second only to the 138.5 million that watched Super Bowl XXX between Dallas and Pittsburgh in 1996.  The 137.7 million viewership is five percent higher than each of the past three Super Bowls, and is the most-watched program in ABC-TV history.         

“The simple fact is that in a television world where everything is going down, the Super Bowl went up,” says JON MANDEL of the Mediacom ad agency. 

• ON LOCAL TV:  Ten local markets pulled ratings in the 50.0 range, including the top market of the day, San Diego, which had its highest Super Bowl rating ever (53.9).  Tampa was  No. 2 with 52.7, followed by Pittsburgh (51.5), Denver (50.8) and Buffalo (49.8) in the top five.  Los Angeles, which has not had an NFL team since 1994, had a higher local rating (43.3/71 share) than the national number (40.7/61).  The Super Bowl XXXVII telecast was the highest-rated show last week in all 55 Nielsen-metered markets.  In the entire 2002 NFL postseason (including Super Bowl), NFL games were the top-rated program in NFL markets 83 percent of the time.     
   
• ON THE WEB:  On Super Bowl Sunday, a record 1.39 million unique users visited SuperBowl.com.
   
• AT THE HALF:  “Halftime Dazzler Provides Big Kick,” screamed the New York Post about the Super Bowl halftime show, which pulled a 40.1 rating and 61 share.  Almost the entire audience (97 percent) of the quarter-hour preceding the halftime stayed with ABC’s Super Bowl telecast to watch SHANIA TWAIN, STING and GWEN STEFANI do their thing.  “The all-too-brief halftime concert was a heart-pumping smash,” wrote the Post.  “The producers of the Super Bowl telecasts have figured out how to put on a world-class halftime.”
   
• IN THE CITY:  A total of 60,177 fans attended the NFL Experience the day before the game, a
  one-day record for the NFL’s interactive Super Bowl theme park which began in Minneapolis at Super Bowl XXVI in 1992……The city’s “Gaslamp” tourist district was packed with more than 100,000 people on Saturday night.  Its usual tally for a Saturday night: 30-40,000…..And at Camp Commando in Kuwait eight time zones away from San Diego, hundreds of U.S. Marines from the
  1st Marine Expedition Force stayed up the entire night to watch the game. 
   
• IN THE PRO BOWL:  ABC’s Pro Bowl telecast (2/2) completed a successful NFL TV season by averaging 9.1 million viewers, 46 percent more than last year (6.2 million, which was against Olympic competition) and 30 percent higher than in 2001 (7.0 million).