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America’s Pastime? Can you say NFL?

By Mike James
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OK, so it’s been the case for several years now, but the Monday night game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Dallas Cowboys drove the point home even more emphatically: The NFL is America’s game, period.

The ESPN game got the highest rating for a show on cable TV ever, a whopping 13.3 ... for a regular-season football game ... in Week 2 of the season.

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How’s that compare? Well, the World Series last fall between the Boston Red Sox and Colorado Rockies averaged a 10.6 rating. The ideal network matchup in last season’s NBA Finals between the Lakers and Boston Celtics averaged a 9.3.

The NFL finals? A 2.6.

-- Mike James

Sports Now
Mike James

Mike James is a former Sports editor of the Los Angeles Times. A native of suburban Washington, D.C., James came to The Times from the Hartford Courant in 1985, took a hiatus from the print world in 2000 to work as coordinating producer at FoxSports.com and managing editor of the nightly news report on Fox Sports Net. He returned to The Times in 2002 and, after three years as deputy Sports editor, became Sports editor in 2009.

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