Red Right 88

It’s the NFL’s world

We’ve known for a long time that Cleveland is the Browns’ town.

Heck, Terry Pluto even wrote a book titled When all the World was Browns Town.

And it’s also well accepted that, while baseball still clings to the outdated title of being the National Pastime, the NFL is the National Passion.

So it didn’t completely surprise us to learn that fans – by an almost 2-to-1 margin – chose to watch the Curtis Painter-led Colts take on Tampa Bay on Monday night rather than watch Detroit (with Justin Verlander) take on the Yankees (with CC Sabathia) in Game 3 of the American League Division Series.

The Monday Night Football game drew a 4.5 rating and 11 share in the coveted 18-49 demographic, and 10.84 million viewers. The baseball game got a 2.1 rating and 5 share in the demographic, and 6.05 million viewers.

Through the first weekend of the playoffs, the ratings for MLB playoff games were down 27 percent from the first three days of last year’s playoffs.

So much for the theory that everyone wants to watch the Yankees.

But we were surprised by this little nugget from USA Today: Fox’s NFL pregame show on Sunday received a bigger overnight rating than any of TBS’ baseball playoff games through the weekend.

Holy smokes!

What’s even more surprising is that people actually watch the pregame drivel that Fox, CBS and ESPN put out on Sundays before the NFL games.

That’s one of the beauties of following the Premiere League: the 11 a.m. game on Sunday finishes up about 5 minutes or so before the 1 p.m. NFL games kick off, so we don’t have to waste our time with pregame hoo-haa.

But still, it’s the NFL’s world, we just live in it.