Orange Bowl grabs slightly better rating than 2000 title game

NEW YORK (AP) -- The low-scoring Orange Bowl produced high preliminary TV ratings.

No. 1 Oklahoma's 13-2 victory over Florida State to claim the national championship Wednesday night drew a 17.0 big-market overnight rating and 26 share for ABC Sports.

That's an increase of 2 percent over the overnight rating for last year's title game, the Sugar Bowl, in which Florida State beat Virginia Tech 46-29 on Jan. 4.

Overnight ratings -- each point represents a little under 700,000 television households -- measure the country's largest TV markets, covering about 65 percent of the United States. Share is the percentage of in-use TVs tuned to a given program.

Full national ratings were expected Thursday afternoon.

The major market with the highest viewership levels was Oklahoma City, where 80 percent of televisions that were on were tuned to the game.