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Sports on the air

Even with Bucs off, area loves its football

Channel 13's Chip Carter knows the Bucs are ratings winners and the bay area is football country. But when told the Tampa/St. Petersburg market produced higher ratings than New York and San Francisco for Sunday's Giants-49ers game on Fox, he was flabbergasted.

"Man!" said Carter, before adding, "That's wild," "Gosh" and "That's incredible."

The reaction was the same from Fox headquarters, where researchers quickly dug into that statistic to find a precedent for two home markets being outrated by an outside market for an NFL game.

No luck.

"That's the first time we could find," Fox spokesman Tim Buckman said. "It's pretty remarkable."

The rating in Tampa/St. Petersburg was 34.8, ahead of San Francisco's 32.6 and New York's 31.1.

That doesn't mean more people here watched the game; just that a higher percentage of households with televisions were tuned in. One ratings point in Tampa Bay equals 16,200 households. In New York, it's 73,010 households, and in San Francisco, 22,000.

So about 2.27-million New Yorkers and 715,000 San Franciscans watched the game. In Tampa/St. Petersburg, about 563,000 households watched.

Nonetheless, ratings are the name of the game, and Tampa/St. Petersburg has been a top-five NFL market all season and proved it doesn't need a Bucs game to stay there.

WHEELING AND DEALING: Time Warner has lost the public relations battle with Sunshine over the negotiations that have kept Lightning and Orlando Magic games off the air, but it's making an effort to appease disgruntled digital cable subscribers.

Time Warner is offering subscribers upset about the Sunshine disappearance inDEMAND's NHL Center Ice package or the NBA League Pass for the rest of the season for free.

That won't help those who want to see Lightning games produced by Sunshine because they aren't provided to Center Ice. (Ten games, though, not produced by Sunshine are scheduled to be available.)

But what amounts to a $109 deal ($119 if you take the basketball) could be enough to help subscribers get over it.

AROUND THE DIAL: Channel 28 will air a documentary at 7:30 p.m. Saturday on the Gruden family. It was created by local independent producer Daphne Boyd. The half-hour documentary is being touted as a behind-the-scenes look at the Grudens, specifically the job parents Kathy and Jim did raising boys Jim, Jon and Jay. ... Jim Rome will return to ESPN to host Rome Is Burning, a weekly one-hour talk show starting May 6. Rome also will have weekly one-minute editorials on SportsCenter and will write columns for ESPN.com. ... ESPN announced its third original movie, Ice Bowl, the Dec.31, 1967, NFL Championship Game between Dallas and Green Bay played in arcticlike conditions in Wisconsin.

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