The only thing I'm sicker of than the Olympics

So on my arrival back into town from the long weekend, I get this:

My name is Nick Bromberg, and I am a journalism student at MU. I am writing a story for class about the Olympic ratings and was wondering if I could ask you a couple of things.

• Have the Olympics lost their relevance? Or with the arrival of the glut of information on the internet, are people less interested to tune in when they know the results?
• Does NBC need to do things differently in order to increase the ratings? Perhaps live coverage on a cable network of the important events, and then a replay on the network at night?
• Do you foresee giant ratings for the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, which will be mostly live? Or are the Turin games a sign of things to come?

To which I replied:

Hi Nick.  I think ratings stories about the coverage of the Olympics have soared in "relevance" -- and god only knows why.  NBC is a fourth-rated network and if it weren't for Turin they wouldn't be winning ANY time periods EVER.

The need to comment on the Winter Games has been the driver behind some remarkably insipid commentary, even from unlikely quarters. Everybody is cooking up cockamamie theories for why the Olympics ratings were so "low."  Meanwhile, my newspaper, and every newspaper I saw during the past two weeks, invariably featured Olympics coverage on the covers.  It was all anyone on ESPN could talk about -- and half those guys hate the Winter Games.  Seems the Olympics are relevant to a lot of folk.

Ironically, it's the expansion of media that has fueled the talk of the Olympics being irrelevant -- because all these gasbags with talk shows and blogs need something to talk about, and this is the topic du jour. Never mind that's it's b.s.  NBC spent probably $5 million an hour for its primetime coverage and improved its ratings in nearly every time period, where it would've been spending $2-$3 million an hour anyway. Plus it generated a blizzard of off-network revenue that will allow it to make almost as much money off the Olympics as it does "The Tonight Show."  Any network would take that.