Nearly eight million households tuned in to watch Georgia beat Hawai'i 41-10 in the Sugar Bowl on New Year's day, ranking the game sixth in viewership among the 32 bowl games played for the 2007 season.

While the Fox audience was a 17 percent drop from the previous New Year's game (Boise State vs. Oklahoma), it was more than three times larger than any game in the Warriors' history.

"In addition to the extensive national television exposure that UH and the state of Hawai'i received on ESPN telecasts during the regular season, it's fantastic to cap the football season with such a large TV audience for Fox's Allstate Sugar Bowl telecast," said John McNamara, UH associate athletic director. "This is exposure that you just can't put a price on and it will pay dividends for years to come."

Fox said the decline from the Boise State-Oklahoma game was "understandable given that this year's game was a 31-point blowout and last year's was one of the great college football games of all time." Georgia led 24-3 at halftime.

Dan Bell, Fox vice president for communications, said, "We are pleased with the rating because the Sugar Bowl helped us dominate all other television competition that night."

Fox said the Sugar Bowl and its pre-game show combined for a 12 percent win over second-place NBC in the "key" adults age 18-to-49 demographic.

Sugar Bowl spokesman Duane Lewis termed the Sugar Bowl rating, "a very solid rating. Given the fact that the game was lopsided, it was still a good number."

Until the Sugar Bowl, the largest audience to view a UH game was the 2.33 million households that saw the Warriors beat Arizona State in the 2006 Sheraton Hawai'i Bowl. The 1992 Holiday Bowl, where UH beat Illinois, drew a higher percentage of viewership than the Hawai'i Bowl.

The Sugar Bowl attendance, 74,383, was the fourth highest among bowls, according to figures compiled by the National Football Foundation. Only the Rose Bowl (93,923), national championship game (79,651) and Chick-Fil-A Bowl (74,413) outdrew the Sugar Bowl. It was the third largest in UH history behind Alabama (92,138) in 2006 and Nebraska (75,615) in 1978.

The 2007 Hawai'i Bowl, which matched East Carolina and Boise State, ranked 28th among the 32 bowls in TV viewership. It attracted 1.4 million households, down more than 40 percent from the UH-Arizona State game of '06.

It could be another month or more before UH finds out how much it will receive from its first Bowl Championship Series appearance. While the school is guaranteed at least $4.2 million before expenses, people involved say the payout could reach as much as $4.5 million.