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There was some talk before Saturday's Las Vegas Bowl that a game between two teams from Utah would not be a draw nationally.

Not true. The Utah-BYU matchup was a considerably bigger national draw than a bowl between teams from Utah and Colorado. And bigger than a bowl between two teams from California.

Saturday's Las Vegas Bowl not only rebounded from low ratings for the 2014 game, it led the opening day of the bowl season by a considerable margin.

The Utes' 35-28 win over the Cougars averaged a 2.2 national rating, up a whopping 57 percent from the 2014 game that featured Utah beating Colorado State 45-10, which averaged a 1.4 rating.

The 2015 Las Vegas Bowl equaled the rating of the 2013 Las Vegas Bowl — a matchup between Southern California and Fresno State. And the Utes-Cougars game drew more viewers (3.675 million) than that Trojans-Bulldogs matchup (3.3 million).

Conventional wisdom tells you that a game featuring the mighty USC Trojans would be ratings gold compared to tin-plated Utah and BYU. Proving that conventional wisdom is often unwise.

Just imagine what the BYU-Utah rating might have been if the Utes' defense hadn't dominated the first quarter, creating five turnovers that turned into five touchdowns and gave Utah what turned out to be an insurmountable lead — barely.

You've got to wonder how many viewers across the country tuned out when it was 35-0 eight minutes into the game.

That was absolutely not the case locally. The ratings on Utah's ABC affiliate, KTVX-Ch. 4, were massive. According to A.C. Nielsen, the game averaged a 23.8 rating and a 50.6 share.

According to ABC, this was the highest-rated bowl game in Utah since at least 2004. The numbers are huge by anyone's measure. And they're measuring just households — meaning that 23.8 percent of the 884,900 TV equipped homes that Nielsen estimates are in the Salt Lake television market, on average, were watching the game. And 50.6 percent of the homes where someone was watching TV were tuned in to the Utes-Cougars game.

(The Salt Lake television markets includes all of Utah as well as parts of Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming.)

The market with the second-highest rating was, not surprisingly, Las Vegas, where the game averaged a 6.7 rating — about one-fourth the number in Utah.

And despite the fact that Utah jumped out to a huge lead so early in the game, viewership here didn't waver much. Other than a dip during halftime — as you might expect — the audience actually built to a high of 27.7/54.8 at the end of the game.

There's some merit in comparing Utah's 2014 and 2015 Las Vegas Bowl viewership, which increased from 2.2 million to 3.675 million — an increase of 67 percent, But it's also true that in 2014, the Utes faced competition from a pro game on the NFL Network that drew 7.2 million viewers.

BYU's 2014 bowl game, on the other hand, is hardly worth comparing to this year at all. Played on a Monday afternoon, last year's Miami Beach Bowl drew 1.3 million viewers in a dreadful time slot — meaning almost three times as many viewer watched the Cougars this year.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, ESPN's telecast of the Utah-Duke basketball game on Saturday morning — a contest the Utes won 77-75 in overtime — averaged 1.44 million viewers.

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