I'm not quite sure why you have such a strong reaction to this. If you actually read the thread, most people were not complaining that they personally couldn't watch the game. They were commenting on whether playing the semi finals on New Year's Eve was good business sense. Clearly, since ESPN had to eat $20 million, it was not. Blowouts don't explain a 1/3 loss in viewership. If you look back at the BCS games, their ratings were fairly consistent from year to year. You might have slight variations based on the popularity of the teams involved, how close the game was, etc., but you didn't have wild fluctuations like a 1/3 dropoff. There is a clear reason why that happened. The games were played on a day when many people weren't home. If you actually read the article (which it appears you didn't, based on your earlier comments), ESPN had predicted a ratings drop on NYE, but the CFP insisted on NYE. They have somehow convinced themselves that watching the games on NYE will be some sort of "new tradition." That's simply not going to work, because there aren't enough diehard fans who will go out of their way to watch these games. Almost all of these big events are planned to correspond to times when people will be off work/at home. Trying to reinvent the wheel didn't work.
