Courtesy USA Today

(February 23, 2010) The biggest flaw in NBC's Winter Olympic prime time is not its tried-and-true strategy, which predictably miffs anybody who expects Olympic TV to be regular TV sports.

No, the big flaw is that NBC sticks too closely to its script when it should improvise.

NBC's unwillingness to occasionally cut to snippets of hot live action has run throughout the Games.

Sunday brought a particularly flashy example when NBC, showing the U.S. men's hockey team's upset of Canada on its MSNBC cable channel, didn't take advantage of what it had.

First, it's no big deal that the game was on cable TV. That's just modern life, where even postseason games involving the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Lakers are already consigned to cable TV, each year including one Major League Baseball League Championship Series and both NBA conference finals. Next year, every college football Bowl Championship Series game, including college football's national title game, will be on cable TV.

And here we're talking hockey, which normally draws tiny U.S. ratings. Granted, Olympic action is different — like soccer games in the World Cup — but even NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman last week noted that "a lot of people are making too big a deal" over Sunday's game being on MSNBC, which has "about as many homes as NBC." (Well, not exactly. MSNBC is in about 92.4 million U.S. TV households, while NBC reaches about 114 million.)

And yes, NBC's prime-time audiences — full of viewers who don't watch Olympic sports outside the Games or even much TV sports at all — may need their Olympic action sliced 'n' diced.

Think of prime-time Olympic TV this way: With its mix of live and taped action, up-close-and-personal featurettes on unknown competitors and analysts critiquing everybody's style, it's much closer to Fox's American Idol than it is to traditional TV sports.

Still, NBC blows it when it can't occasionally chuck its prime-time scripts to seize the moment. Like when the USA-Canada game was a roaring tempest in its final minutes ("It was the loudest interior noise I've ever heard," NBC News anchor Brian Williams recalled on-air Monday), and NBC was ... having Bob Costas introducing taped bobsled. And then showing the sledders. Be still my heart.

When NBC finally switched to hockey with less than a minute to play, arriving viewers were informed that the USA had just scored an empty-netter to ice the win.

Nothing like finally getting into the hottest bar in town right after last call.

The economic reality — NBC has said it would lose at least $250 million on its Vancouver coverage — dictates the best action will be held for prime time.

And sports that are relatively high-profile in the USA and thus best shown in their entirety, such as hockey or basketball in the Summer Games, will air on cable TV.

But there should be adrenaline-charged exceptions. Like giving viewers live look-ins on a hot Lindsey Vonn or Bode Miller daytime ski run rather than holding it for hours for prime time. Or taking NBC's audience to cable TV hockey for the final minutes of a frenzied upset. NBC more often needs to replace its choreographed routines with kick saves.

•Hockey, P.S.: MSNBC's USA-Canada hockey game drew 4.3% of U.S. TV households.

Ratings, like any stats, are open to interpretation. That 4.3% is MSNBC's third-highest rating ever, behind only its Democratic presidential debate in February 2008 and the analysis show that followed it.

But here's another way of looking at it: MSNBC's hockey rating was 48% below what ESPN drew for the NFL Pro Bowl exhibition game on a Sunday night three weeks ago.

NBC's Vancouver prime-time coverage is averaging 14.5% of U.S. TV households. That's up 20% over the 2006 Torino Winter Olympics, which were the lowest-rating Games since 1988. Milwaukee, averaging 22.8% nightly, remains the top-drawing local TV market, followed by Denver, Salt Lake and Seattle.

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