Miami beat Notre Dame on Saturday night. You may be aware of that by now. College GameDay was there on Saturday morning to hype the game, and ABC broadcast the Hurricanes' 41-8 whipping to a national primetime audience, a broadcast that essentially became a 4-hour infomercial for an orange and green party.
Locally, the game earned a 15.6 TV rating, which made Canes-Irish the most-watched football game in South Florida this season -- period. In fact, it was the most-watched local sporting event in South Florida in two and a half years. From the Miami Herald:
And we found it interesting that the UM-Notre Dame game was seen in more than 32,000 more homes locally than the Miami Dolphins’ first Sunday night game this decade, just six nights earlier.
The UM-Notre Dame game drew a 15.6 rating on ABC-10 in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale market. That’s equal to 15.6 percent of Dade/Broward homes with TV sets.
That’s higher than every Dolphins game this season and much, much higher than every Heat game since Game 7 of the Heat-Raptors playoff series in May 2015. (That game topped a 17 local rating.)
And then there was this tweet from Miami associate professor Windy Dees:
Miami has clinched a spot in the ACC Championship, and a win there would send the Hurricanes to the College Football Playoff, thereby giving the school even more exposure.
Last Saturday -- Miami's best day since Jan. 3, 2002, when the Hurricanes beat Nebraska to win their most recent national championship -- was just another example of how, when done right, there's nothing that can bring positive exposure to a university like sports.
And there's no sport like football.