Eagles win ratings battle with Phillies

By Mike Jensen

Inquirer Staff Writer

Was there a sports fan in this town not watching both the Eagles and the Phillies on Sunday?

In fact, the Eagles game dominated the local television ratings over the Phillies. The NFL always dominates the numbers, especially when the baseball game is on cable only. The two games - Eagles-Redskins in a crucial NFC East game on Fox29, the Phillies closing out Milwaukee in the National League division series on TBS - ran simultaneously and finished within a minute of each other.

According to ratings released yesterday, 23.3 percent of the houses turned on in this market were turned to the Eagles-Redskins game, equating to 687,000 households. For the Phillies, 13 percent (383,000 households) of the TVs on at the time were watching their game against the Brewers.

In the real world, many seemed glued to both.

"I have a unique situation - in my basement, I have two TVs with separate cable lines," said Rowan men's basketball coach Joe Cassidy. "I sat in my reclining chair and watched them both in their entirety, and I have VCRs on both of them in case I missed something."

TBS could have avoided a conflict by having the Phillies play at 4 p.m. But that would have caused a conflict in Chicago, because the Bears were playing at 1 p.m. while the White Sox played at 4. Fox had the Cowboys down for a 4 p.m. game, so presumably it wasn't interested in moving the Eagles-Redskins game.

A lot of people got creative. Luke Butler, a junior at Temple University, said he and his roommates took a television from a room upstairs and stacked it top of their TV in the living room of their off-campus home on Jefferson Street, running a cable downstairs to get the top TV hooked up.

"The top was the Phillies game, the bottom was the Eagles," Butler said. "As the Eagles were falling apart, we were mainly just watching the Phillies game."

Bill Avington, director of marketing and communications at St. Joseph's Prep, was at his son's soccer game, but he had a radio tuned to the Phillies. "A father down the row was listening to the Eagles," Avington said, adding that another dad wore an Eagles flip-flop on one foot, a Phillies flip-flop on the other.

When he got home, Avington said, he watched the Phillies and turned to the Eagles between innings.

Another college basketball coach, Alfred Johnson at Holy Family, said he was at a basketball game Sunday afternoon at the Solebury School in New Hope.

"From the bleachers you could see the TV in the coach's office. The Eagles game was on there," Johnson said. "I listened to the Phillies game on the radio. I went back and forth to the car. It should have been vice-versa. You believe that [Eagles] game? Two weeks in a row, they can't get in the end zone. Thank God for the Phillies right now."

The score obviously affected viewing habits. A lot of people wanted to see another clinching. Temple student Steve Brecher said he and a roommate "pretty much watched the whole first half of the Eagles and watched the Phillies during commercials" at their Broad Street apartment.

"After the first half, it was the complete opposite," Brecher said.

Contact staff writer Mike Jensen at 215-854-4489 or mjensen@phillynews.com.

Staff writer Josh Schrager contributed to this article.