Not exactly...

Dear Internets:

Count me among the nation of converted, apparently. Last Wednesday's primetime telecast of NBC's Vancouver games coverage did a stupid number: 29.4 million viewers! For those of you who want to scoff at that rating, it's 2.2mil BETTER than the closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing games, the culmination of what NBC touted at the time as "the most watched television event in American TV history." Hyperbole, be damned....

This is certainly some of the chillier humbler pie Winter games detractors have eaten in a while...170.6mil viewers for the week ending Sunday has to be better than NBC thought they were going to do...Just shy of 24.4mil viewers a night is within spitting distance of the 27mil plus the Peacock averaged a night during the Beijing games.

Why? Maybe there was a slingshot effect to that poor luger biting the bullet the afternoon before the opening ceremonies. The (unedited) footage was all over the TV, so a certain sector of the population may have said, "wait, there are Olympics going on right now?" when they saw that dude careening off the unpadded support beem at 80+ miles per hour (the family elected not to file a wrongful death suit stemming from the accident BEETEEDUB; this is a sports law blog after all). Maybe NBC stubbornly sticking to its network formula: TD+FT+ID+MIB-H = E (tape delay + Flying Tomato + ice dancing + men in blouses - hockey = eyeballs) really makes sense. Maybe it was Tiger Woods reminding everybody on Friday that amateur athletes may be the only role models left in all of sports.

For some reason, my dear internets, a games devoid of names like Phelps, filled with HOURS of curling (the only event where one can take down five Molson XXXs and still walk away with gold), and putting NBC by some accounts $250mil IN THE RED has to be considered a smashing success up until this point. Unless you're Yevgeny Plushenko. That dude's a prick.