BCS TV number chomping

The top 10 TV markets for producing viewers for Thursday's Florida-Oklahoma BCS championship game on Fox, provided by Nielsen Research:

1. Oklahoma City: 52.6 rating/67 share
2. Tulsa, Okla.: 47.8/68
3. Birmingham, Ala.: 41.8/53
4. Jacksonville, Fla.: 40.5/55
5. Tampa, Fla.: 32.5/49
6. Orlando, Fla.: 30.7/45
7. Austin, Tex.: 30.3/46
8. West Palm Beach, Fla.: 29.8/42
9. Fort Myers, Fla.: 28.4/42
10. Columbus, Ohio: 26.7/40

Overall, Fox reports a fast national rating of 15.8/25, calculating to 26.8 million viewers, which is up over the 2008 title game (LSU-Ohio State, 14.4/22, 23.1 million viewers). Fox won the night of network competition, followed by ABC (7.2), CBS (6.2) and NBC (3.9).

All BCS games on Fox added up to a four-game average of 9.9, up from 9.0 a year ago.

Why does the overall BCS rating on Fox seem to, uh, lack a lot of juice? It's a regional sport, and without a team from the major three markets -- New York, L.A. or Chicago -- it suffers a body blow in this case.

Los Angeles, for example, did a 11.3/19 rating, down three percent from last year. It ranked 48 out of the 56 markets.

Chicago (ranked 43rd) did a 12.7/20 rating, actually up from last year's 11.2/16.
New York (ranked 54th) did a 8.9/14 rating, also up from last year's 7.5/12.