Common sense tells us that if Sunday's Super Bowl matchup between the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles is a close, competitive game, it will draw a higher average rating.

Of course, common sense also tells us that nobody in America is going to sit through all eight-plus hours of pregame programming that Fox is planning, but I'm sure there are people out there who will.

If you go down a list of the 38 previous Super Bowls and compare the average ratings to the final margin of victory, there isn't a whole lot that correlates. On average, the winning team has scored almost 15.9 points more than the losing team in Super Bowls I through XXXVIII (which means that, yes indeed, a lot of the games have been snoozers).

Not surprisingly the average margin of the 10 lowest-rated games, 17.7, exceeds the overall average. But then so does the average margin of the 10 highest-rated games, 16.4.

The closest Super Bowl ever — the Giants' one-point win over the Bills in 1987 — is a surprising 24th on the ratings list. That's one rung below a 32-point blowout in Super Bowl XXII; 12 rungs below a 35-point blowout in XXVII; 18 rungs below a 29-point blowout in XVIII; and 21 rungs below a 36-point blowout in XX.

The biggest blowout ever — the 49ers' 55-10 demolition of Denver in Super Bowl XXIV — is way down on the list at No. 36, which is pretty much what you might expect. But if you look up that list just a bit at No. 34, you'll see the second-closest game ever, a three-point win in Super Bowl V. That's a margin tied by Super Bowl XXXVI (No. 31 on the ratings list) and Super Bowl XXXVIII (No. 26).

What all of this tells us is . . . not much, really. Except that the Super Bowl has transcended sports as a television event, becoming just simply an event. Clearly, tens of millions of people who rarely if ever watch an NFL game during the regular season watch the Super Bowl. And, because the game itself doesn't matter as much as the event, the quality of the contest doesn't drive the ratings.

BY THE WAY, the most-watched Super Bowl was not the highest-rated — it doesn't work that way.

A ratings point represents one percent of the households in America that have television. And, since that number has changed dramatically in the past four decades, a rating point today represents a whole lot more households than a rating point did back in 1967 when both CBS and NBC telecast Super Bowl I.

(CBS, which aired the NFL regular season, won that battle, by the way. It averaged a 22.6 rating to the 18.5 NBC — the home of the AFL — averaged.)

The highest-rated Super Bowl in history was XVI. The 49ers' win over the Bengals averaged a 49.1 rating.

But the most-watch Super Bowl was last year's, when 143.6 million people tuned in to see the Patriots beat the Panthers.

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com