But in the 21st century of college, with nearly every game on television, how vital is the local play-by-play broadcast anymore to fans?

Apparently, still very vital.

According to an unscientific NewsOK.com poll, asking just how valuable the OU football radio broadcast is, better than 80 percent of almost 1,400 respondents answered either “Valuable” or “Very Valuable.”

“There's still something magical about listening to a sports broadcast on the radio,” said Buddy Wiley, operations manager for KRXO 107.7 FM, the flagship station for Sooner football. “People are going to watch the games on TV when they can, but we like to be there as the option for when you can't be there in front of the TV.”

The days of sitting beside a radio and listening to a football game for three hours have long been numbered. Thanks to the advent of HD, the television-watching experience of games has never been better.

But thousands of people still catch games on the radio, if only for short stints at a time.

“You'd be surprised at how many people listen to games while running errands,” said Vance Harrison, president of the Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters who previously was the general manager of KOMA and KRXO.

“They're not sitting down listening for four hours. But a lot of times, I might tune in for 15 minutes to pick up my son from soccer practice, then drive back listening to another 15 minutes. I just listened to 30 minutes of the game on the radio. And there's nothing unusual about that.”

The ratings support the premise that people are listening.

According to Wiley, KRXO was No. 3 in the ratings on Saturdays last summer behind the KATT and KJ103 with a 7 share among adults 25 to 54.

On Saturdays last fall, KRXO moved all the way up to No. 1 with a 10.1 share.

“Having OU football has a lot of value to KRXO,” Wiley said.

Possibly even more value than Oklahoma's current archaic diary ratings system, where people are asked to write down what they listen to in a notebook, suggests.

Research done by the ratings company Arbitron has revealed that in markets that have gone from the diary to the technologically advanced Portable People Meter — a device that accurately measures how many people are listening to a radio station and precisely for how long — ratings for sporting events go up significantly.

“When they bring PPM to Oklahoma, when it does come here,” Harrison said, “Thunder games on the Sports Animal, OU football games on KRXO, OSU football on KXY will see a blip up in the ratings.”