Giants Host Cowboys After Nine Straight Sunday Night Blowouts, The National Football League’s Sunday night lineup has featured traditional rivalries, record-setting performances, the opening of a new stadium and, above all, blowouts.
Nine straight nationally televised Sunday night games have been decided by at least 18 points, with the average margin of victory at 24.6. The average point spread for those games at Las Vegas sportsbooks was 3.3 points.
“There’s no way anybody before the season could have predicted this, based on the matchups,” said Rick Gentile, a sports management instructor at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, and a former executive producer and senior vice president at CBS Sports. “It’s just bad luck.”
Even with their lopsided nature, ratings have been strong on Comcast Corp.’s NBC. Since the Sept. 4 kick off of the regular season, 28 of the 30 most-watched programs on television have been NFL games. Nine of those have been on Sunday night. Tomorrow, the New York Giants host the Dallas Cowboys.
“Remember when the Super Bowl every year was a horrendous game? That went on for years,” Gentile said. “The audience the beginning of the game the next year was just as high as ever. The league is very conscious of the fact that this is their premiere game, really more than Monday Night Football now.”The Cowboys are the NFL’s only unbeaten team on the road this season. Before last week’s 16-10 loss to San Francisco, the Giants were the only NFL team to have all of their games decided by 10 points or more.
Previous Games
Both teams have already played on Sunday night this season: the Giants getting shut out 27-0 by the Philadelphia Eagles on Oct. 12 and the Cowboys routing the New Orleans Saints 38-17 two weeks before that.
Former Giants center Shaun O’Hara, now an analyst for NFL Network, sees the potential for another blowout tomorrow.
Not only is New York’s injury-riddled defense -- which has allowed the second-most yards in the NFL -- going up against the league’s No. 2 rushing offense, but O’Hara said the Giants have shown a lack of confidence in their ability to come from behind.
“If they get down early, I think they realize that they’re not good enough to overcome that,” O’Hara said in a telephone interview. “As soon as they’re down 10 points, it’s almost like they see the writing on the wall. They realize, ‘alright, this game is over with,’ and they go on autopilot.”
The Giants, who have lost five straight games to drop to 3-7, are 3 1/2-point underdogs at home in East Rutherford, New Jersey, against the Cowboys. Dallas is tied for the division lead at 7-3 and is a perfect 4-0 on the road this season.
Opening Week
The closest of the NFL’s 11 Sunday night games this season was the Denver Broncos’ 31-24 opening-week victory over the Indianapolis Colts. With the win, Peyton Manning joined Brett Favre as the only quarterbacks to beat each of the NFL’s 32 current franchises.
The San Francisco 49ers opened their new venue, Levi’s Stadium, with a 28-20 loss to the Chicago Bears in the Week 2 Sunday night game. Every game since has been lopsided, the biggest blowout coming two weeks ago in the Green Bay Packers’ 41-point romp over the division-rival Bears.
The New England Patriots last week cruised past the Colts 42-20 in a showdown of division leaders as Jonas Gray, a third-string running back, broke out with 201 rushing yards and a franchise-record four touchdowns. The week before, Aaron Rodgers threw six first-half scoring passes to tie the Packers’ franchise record and match the NFL mark for a half.
Record Performances
In Week 9, Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger threw six touchdowns for the second week in a row in a 43-23 win over the division-rival Ravens to tie the NFL record for touchdown passes in consecutive games. Manning broke Favre’s record for career touchdown passes in the Broncos’ 42-17 win over the 49ers in the Week 7 Sunday night matchup.
Even with the results, the NFL said Sunday Night Football remains the No. 1 show on primetime TV, averaging more than 21 million viewers. Last week, Sunday Night Football had an audience of about 20 million, while AMC’s “The Walking Dead” drew about 14 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. The Sunday night broadcast of “The Walking Dead” has been the most-watched cable broadcast five of the past six weeks, with an average of about 5 million fewer viewers than the NFL game on NBC, according to Nielsen data.
“Obviously, when you have close games that go down to the wire, ratings and viewership benefit,” NBC said in an e-mailed statement. “But the action on the field is beyond anyone’s control, you don’t know what’s going to happen from one week to the next. That’s why the NFL is such a great TV property.”
Most-Watched Programs
The Giants’ previous Sunday night appearance is among the three such games this year that weren’t among the top 30 most-watched programs since the start of the NFL season. O’Hara, who played with the Giants from 2004-10, said he hopes he’s wrong about the game potentially being a blowout and that New York gives football fans something to watch.
“The Giants, in a game like this, nobody is picking them to win, this is when they seem to be at their best,” he said. “It’s prime time, national television, everyone is watching and a lot of people think the Cowboys are going to run for 300 yards. This is when the team seems to come out swinging.”
