The 2008 college football season comes to a close tonight as Oklahoma and Florida face off in the BCS National Championship Game. As usual, the only major sport that has no playoff system has followed up a thrilling season with a seemingly arbitrary matchup, leaving several equally deserving teams out of the running for the championship. The Bowl Championship Series uses a combination of “Top 25” polls and so-called “computer rankings” that grade teams on factors such as strength of schedule, quality of wins, etc. to determine the two teams that will compete in the title game. Rarely does the college football community agree on who the two best teams are, and of the 11 seasons of the BCS, seven have ended with disagreement over who should play for the title: Florida State/Miami in 2000, Colorado/Nebraska/Oregon in 2001, LSU/Oklahoma/USC in 2003, Auburn/LSU/USC in 2004, Florida/Michigan in 2006, Georgia/Ohio State/LSU/Oklahoma/Virginia Tech in 2007, and now Florida/Oklahoma/Texas/USC/Utah in 2008.

In each of these years, angry pundits and fans – particularly fans of those schools left out of the title game – condemn the BCS as an unjust, biased system that fails to achieve its most basic objective of determining a true “best team” in college football. Despite all this, the BCS lands one major TV contract after another. Fox picked up broadcast rights in 2006, and ESPN recently inked a deal worth 50% more than Fox’s, which will start with the 2010 season. On the surface, the TV deals sound outrageous to fans, given the unpopularity of the current system. But have the BCS’s problems translated into problems for the sport in general?

Hardly. For all the controversy it creates, the BCS certainly knows how to spark a good conversation, and all the arguing over which one-loss team is better than all the other one-loss teams has only served to put more eyeballs in front of the TV and in front of the computer during the season.

Whether in spite of, because of, or irrespective of the BCS, online interest in the college football season has continued to rise year after year. FoxSports.com has seen substantial growth in its college-football viewership since Fox began its partnership with the BCS in 2006, despite the TV network’s dearth of regular-season broadcasts. The ESPN brand is obviously the most recognizable in the sports landscape, and their season-long TV, radio, and magazine coverage has naturally contributed to ESPN.com’s growth in recent years. But the biggest gainer has been Yahoo! Sports – the true leader in sports on the web – which has actually doubled its college football traffic in the past four years, thanks in part to its acquisition last year of Rivals.com, a top source for college sports and recruiting news.

Each new season generates a new controversy, and each new controversy generates more traffic across the interwebs. ESPN’s new deal to keep this horrible system festering for four more years will likely ensure that all those angry eyeballs stay tuned. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to prepare to curse this system for the entire four-hour telecast tonight that I will, of course, watch intently

There was speculation that MLB playoff TV ratings would suffer this year with the New York Yankees missing the playoffs for the first time in over a decade. It looks like not even rooting against hated rivals was enough to draw in all those lost fans, as viewership has fallen off for both the early rounds and the World Series. But has this downturn been exclusive to television?

In short, yes - the online channel has been able to avoid the same late-season slump. Unique visitors to MLB.com were up for the end of the regular season and the first three weeks of the playoffs.

There was an average of more than an 18% increase in weekly unique visitors for this period, with the usual drop-off as the weeks passed and more teams were eliminated. ESPN’s baseball pages saw a similar increase of just under 19% over 2007 numbers. The steep increases for both sites significantly out-paced the growth in the Internet browser population since last September. Media buyers may want to take note that it seems that interest still exists, but instead of spending hours watching the games live, people are now more likely to visit online channels for updates and stories.

While the Yankees missing the playoffs did cause a drop, it was more than made up for by the big market Dodgers making a run and the 100th year of the Cubs drought drawing attention.

National League teams saw a huge jump in average weekly unique visitors this year, but with the early exit from the popular and downtrodden Cubs a lot of interest was lost early as well. It seems that the MLB may accompany Cubs fans in wishing for a winner on the North side of Chicago. There’s always next year…

This past Saturday night, CBS broadcast its 3rd live mixed martial arts primetime event. The show, which featured Internet sensation “Kimbo Slice” losing via quick knockout in the main event, was promoted heavily by CBS for the past few weeks. How many consumers are interested in MMA as a sport, and how far has it come in comparison to boxing in popularity?

The most popular MMA websites now far outrank their boxing counterparts, with UFC.com attracting nearly a million monthly U.S. visitors. UFC.com, the official website of the largest mixed martial arts promoter, and Sherdog.com, the largest MMA news & community website, are 3X to 8X larger than the closest boxing websites.

Since boxing does not have a single dominant promoter in the way that the UFC dominates MMA, it may not be a surprise that UFC.com is the largest website. To create a fairer comparison, the boxing and MMA sections of Yahoo! Sports were carved out to see how they stacked up.

Beginning in January of 2008, the MMA section of Yahoo! surpassed the boxing section in visitors. With the exception of this last July when boxing champion Floyd Mayweather had his most recent bout, the gap between MMA and boxing has continued to grow.

The last comparison looks at individual athletes and how many consumers were using search engines to look for them. The average big name athlete in MMA has been able to draw more searcher interest than big name boxers. And, while some boxers generate heavy buzz among searchers when they are heading into a big fight, MMA fighters appear to generate sustained searcher interest even in the down-time periods between fights.

Final score:

While boxing has a more storied history and firmer standing in American culture, mixed martial arts has no doubt captured the attention of today’s consumer and fight fan. All signs point towards continued success for this young sport.

The 2008 Olympic Summer Games are well under way in Beijing, while the contest continues online for audience reach and engagement.

NBC spent $900 million for exclusive rights to broadcast the Beijing Olympics on TV and online. On August 9th, the day after the Opening Ceremony, nearly 2 million unique visitors dropped by NBCOlympics.com to catch the replay.

A week later, NBCOlympics.com shows no sign of slowing down, but Yahoo!’s Olympic coverage has taken the lead in US average daily reach.

Yahoo had 1.5 million average daily visitors compared to NBC’s 1.2. But where Yahoo! is winning the gold in reach, NBC narrowly leads in engagement. Of the nearly 17 million hours spent at the top Olympics sites in the US, NBC edged out Yahoo! by 5%.

Interestingly, visitors to NBC have stayed steadily longer, while length of stay at Yahoo! has been more volatile.

The reason? NBC provides exclusive access to full-length episodes of the events, even if the marquee ones are tape-delayed, whereas Yahoo! hosts short highlights and newswire stories.

As more of the 3,000 hours of Olympic event video that NBC will capture comes online, visitors have stayed longer. Meanwhile, Yahoo!’s spikes correspond to the major news events: the Opening Ceremony and August 16th, the day Michael Phelps won his 8th gold medal.

Although the Opening Ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics don’t start until tonight, some events have already begun. Likewise, the flow of traffic online for the Olympics got an early start this year, reaching an early peak during the height of last month’s qualifying competitions.

NBC’s official Olympics site (NBCOlympics.com) is gaining steam leading up to tonight, as are the Olympics sections on two popular sports websites: ESPN.com and Yahoo! Sports. The official website for these summer Olympics (en.Beijing2008.cn) lags behind, currently finishing out of the medals.

Although Beijing2008.com and NBCOlympics.com come in first and third respectively as search destinations in a broad match for the term ‘olympics’ since early May, neither is attracting as much Olympics interest as ESPN or Yahoo! Sports. It appears as though users looking for information though search engines are more inclined to use the Olympics-specific sites, while those foregoing search are more likely to use familiar sports sites.

The Olympics sites will of course see a huge spike once the games start, but the spike may be even bigger this year than for previous contests. The chart below compares traffic to NBC’s official Olympics site in the months leading up to and during the Games in 2004 and 2008.

Whether driven by the controversy over protests during the torch relay, the air quality in the city, or a heightened interest in the actual events, NBC’s Olympics site has seen three times more traffic in June and July of 2008 than in 2004. There are still question marks about whether Beijing will be a success as an Olympics venue, but signs are already pointing towards the games being bigger than ever online.

With the bulk of the major soccer competitions coming to a close in Europe over the past couple months, it seems like a good time to give out one final trophy. While this one may not be quite as prestigious as a league championship or the Champions League or Euro title, the battle for the top European club online in the U.S. is still a heated one. And judging from all the off-season tours that many of these teams have made to America in the past few years, the battle for American fandom is one all of these clubs would like to win.

Traffic to the team pages on ESPN Soccernet, BigSoccer.com, and Goal.com was included to give a sampling of the casual to the hardcore fans. I chose the thirteen most popular clubs from the biggest leagues across Europe, and just to prove that I have no bias here, I didn’t even include my favorite team (although not winning a major trophy for nearly 4 decades would have made it hard to justify including Newcastle United).

It’s no surprise that Manchester United, regarded as the most popular club in the world, has the biggest fan base in the U.S. The English Premier League looks to have the greatest following on the whole as well, taking four of the top five spots.

But which team has the most engaged fans? A look as visits per unique visitor for these three sites shows which fan base just can’t get enough of their team.

The tables are somewhat turned on their head with Juventus going from tenth to first with nearly five visits per unique visitor, and Manchester United dropping from the top spot all the way to 9th. It looks like Liverpool, with the fifth most unique visitors and second most visits per UV, could be the real winner here. Their team slogan, “You will never walk alone,” appears to be appropriate even in the online channel.

With soccer’s growing popularity in the U.S., this is a battle that is sure to go on for years, and while there may not be any trophy for the winner, I’m sure the financial rewards will be more than enough.