The Champs Sports Bowl between Wisconsin and Florida State had the best national rating and most viewers for any of the 25 college football bowl games televised on cable TV last season.
Champs, carried on ESPN, also finished ahead of three of the nine bowl games carried on network TV. Champs had a 4.45 rating and an estimated 7,059,000 viewers, ranking it seventh among all 34 bowl games.
A total of 50.8% more viewers watched Wisconsin-Florida State than watched Boston College-Michigan State in the previous Champs Sports Bowl matchup.
The Badgers were on the losing end of a blowout. The Seminoles won, 42-13.
The 29-point differential was the third-biggest among all the bowl games.
Only Louisiana State's 35-point victory over Georgia Tech in the Chick-fil-A and Tulsa's 32-point victory over Ball State in the GMAC were more lopsided.
The national championship game between Florida and Oklahoma drew the most viewers nationally of all the bowl games, with almost 26.8 million.
The smallest number of viewers for a bowl game was for the Texas Bowl between Rice and Western Michigan. Only 186,000 viewers watched because the game was carried on the NFL Network, which is in just a fraction of TV households in the country.
Kelley's heroes
ESPN college basketball game analyst Mike Kelley said asking him to pick his favorite guards in the Big East Conference was like asking him to pick his favorite child.
It's an impossible task, but the former University of Wisconsin point guard crafted a list anyway.
Kelley cast his preferences in two groups of five, which he talked about Saturday during the telecast of Marquette's game against West Virginia.
All three of Marquette's senior guards made Kelley's collection of the 10 top guards in the conference.
Kelley's first five were LeVance Fields of Pittsburgh, Jerel McNeal of Marquette, Kyle McAlarney of Notre Dame, Jonny Flynn of Syracuse and Scottie Reynolds of Villanova.
On his best of the rest list were Tory Jackson of Notre Dame, Dominic James and Wesley Matthews of Marquette, Jerome Dyson of Connecticut and Deonta Vaughn of Cincinnati.
Coop de grace
When former Boston Red Sox slugger Jim Rice learned Monday that he had been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, he called family first to tell them the good news.
Rice called his wife, daughter and sister, according to the Boston Herald.
Then he called Cecil Cooper, the former Milwaukee Brewers first baseman who is now manager of the Houston Astros.
Cooper played for the Red Sox and with Rice from 1971-'76 before he joined the Brewers from 1977-'87.
Cooper and Rice are godfathers to one another's children.
Rice also called Goose Gossage, a Hall inductee last year. Gossage said he thought Rice would be chosen for the honor last year.
"He was wishing me the best, so that's another guy I called," Rice told the Herald, referring to Gossage.
Pride of Beloit
Jim Caldwell, who replaced Tony Dungy as head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, is a native of Beloit.
Caldwell, who turns 54 on Friday, was a three-sport star for Beloit Memorial in football, basketball and track.
He was all-state in football playing defensive back and running back. He went on to start for four seasons as a defensive back at Iowa.
He was a starting guard on the Purple Knights' WIAA Class A state championship team in 1973 under coach Bernie Barkin. Caldwell also competed as a sprinter in track.
In his coaching career, he made six stops as an assistant at Iowa, Southern Illinois, Northwestern, Colorado, Louisville and Penn State, and one stop as a head coach, at Wake Forest. In the NFL he coached at Tampa Bay in the 2001 season before joining the Colts in 2002, when Dungy was hired in Indianapolis.
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