Who Was The Winner In Last Night's Scab-Ref Debacle? SportsCenter, With Its Highest Rating Ever

OK, so Twitter went nuts last night and TJ Lang's "fuck it" tweet has been retweeted more than 84,000 times. And SportsCenter, with more than 50,000 previous episodes under its belt, has what looks to be its highest rated-show ever with a 5.0 rating.

The game itself was nothing special in the ratings. It did an 11.5, which was 3 percent off of last year's Week 3 Monday Night Football game.

But after the game was over—was it over? Was that really it?—a huge chunk of the ESPN audience that usually goes to bed kept watching for SportsCenter. Scott Van Pelt and Linda Cohn hosted more than an hour of coverage of pretty much nothing other than the last play of the game. Stuart Scott, Trent Dilfer, and Steve Young were live from Seattle; Chris Mortensen came in on his cell; John Clayton appeared on the show in...pajamas? Workout clothes? Rick Reilly, reporting on what he saw in the Packers locker room, managed not to be a total abomination. There was press conference coverage from Aaron Rodgers and Mike McCarthy.

Compare it to the week before, when the Falcons and Broncos got an 11.3, and SportsCenter got a 2.7. Moral of the story: The scabs are a disaster—but when there's a disaster on TV, people tune in.