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Adding Notre Dame to the bowl championship series didn’t pay dividends for ABC.

The preliminary ratings for the network’s New Year’s Day telecasts of the first two BCS games, the Rose and Fiesta bowls, dropped about 4% from last season.

Notre Dame’s 41-9 loss to No. 5 Oregon State in the Fiesta Bowl drew a 10.4 overnight rating and 17 share.

That’s down 5.5% from the 11.0/19 earned by last year’s Orange Bowl, played in the same time period and won, 35-34, in overtime by Michigan over Alabama.

The Rose Bowl, in which Washington beat Purdue, 34-24, was down 3% from last year, when Wisconsin beat Stanford, 17-9.

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A bleary-eyed Bob Davie insisted Notre Dame is not as far from returning to national prominence as Oregon State made it appear in the Fiesta Bowl.

“It just looked like the gap was wide athletically again,” Davie said Tuesday. “I don’t think it’s as wide athletically as it ended up being last night. I’m really excited about this team.”

The loss to Oregon State (11-1) was the team’s worst under Davie and Notre Dame’s second-biggest bowl defeat.

The Irish thought they were ready to rejoin college football’s elite, but were thoroughly outplayed and looked slow against the Beavers.

“I’ll remember their speed and I’ll remember their aggressiveness,” linebacker Rocky Boiman said.

“It seemed to me we ran into a buzzsaw. They just had a bunch of speed athletes,” Davie said. “You would have hoped you could have taken them out of some of their things or be able to play our game. That never materialized. . . .

“We’re probably in as good a shape right now as we’ve been in since I’ve been at Notre Dame. Right now you feel really down. But when you stop and look at the big picture of it, I think we’re in a lot better shape than we’ve been in in recent years.”

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Redshirt freshman quarterback A.J. Suggs, a Georgia native who lost his starting position midway through the season, confirmed that he is transferring from Tennessee to Georgia Tech.

After meeting with Tennessee Coach Phillip Fulmer, Suggs said he “concluded that a transfer to Georgia Tech was in my best interest.”