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According to the TV ratings, more people watched BYU get blown out by Michigan on Saturday than watched Utah blow out Oregon.

The Wolverines 31-0 destruction of the Cougars averaged a 2.53 household rating; the Utes' 62-20 annihilation of the Ducks averaged a 2.1 household rating.

(A rating point represents 1 percent of the 114.7 million TV-equipped households Nielsen estimates are in America.)

Utah averaged 2.97 million viewers; the viewership numbers for the BYU game aren't in yet.

If there's a message here, it's that you can't get too caught up in TV ratings. If the better team got higher viewership, clearly the Utes would have had way more people watching than the Cougars on Saturday.

That BYU got higher ratings than Utah means … not much. These are not scientific experiments in which everything is equal except for the teams that are playing.

That would require that the Utes and Cougars play the same team at the same time on the same channel. And that's not going to happen. Duh.

A more legitimate comparison would be looking at the Utah-Oregon game vs. the UCLA-Arizona matchup, which took place pretty much concurrently on Saturday night on two channels — Fox and ABC, respectively — that reach the same number of homes. (Broadcast networks are in pretty much every home in America that has a TV.)

And Utah-Oregon came out on top in that matchup, averaging 2.97 million viewers to 2.39 million for UCLA-Arizona — a 20 percent advantage for the Utes and the Ducks.

But even that's not a fair comparison, and not just because the Utah-Oregon game kicked off a half hour after the UCLA-Arizona game. The ratings numbers are averaged over the length of the broadcast, and UCLA had a 42-14 lead at the half, which doesn't exactly encourage iewers to stick with the game unless they happen to be Bruins fans.

Oregon, on the other hand, was still within striking distance of the Utah — sort of — at halftime, trailing 27-13.

If I were a college football fan in Middle America watching UCLA-Arizona, I would have changed channels to the Utes-Ducks game at halftime (or before). And then I would have stayed there as Utah's amazing second-half unfolded.

But that's just me.

The only thing that really matters about TV ratings is that they're good enough for your team's TV partners to continue to do business with them, and both BYU and the Pac-12 are doing just fine.

By the way, the Utah-Oregon numbers were the best on Fox so far this season.

If these ratings are an indication of anything, it's that (a) you can't underestimate the drawing power of the Big Ten and the Michigan Wolverines; and (b) playing a team in the Eastern Time Zone makes more of a difference than those of us who live in the West like to admit.

And, as was the case with BYU's Hail Mary win over Nebraska to open the season, you can't measure the impact of Utah's annihilation of Oregon in just the game numbers. The coverage of that win stretched across television — from local stations to every cable sports network — and was hugely positive.

And there's also a part of me that wonders if the BYU numbers weren't inflated at least a little bit by Utah fans who tuned in to watch the Cougars go down in flames — and if the Utah numbers weren't deflated a tad by BYU fans who couldn't stand to watch the Utes demonstrate their dominance over Oregon.

Scott D. Pierce covers TV for The Salt Lake Tribune. Email him at spierce@sltrib.com; follow him on Twitter @ScottDPierce.