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Local Nielsen ratings snapshot (Fri.-Sun., Nov. 16-18)

By ED BARK
The Cowboys-Redskins game is in the ratings books, and it surprisingly doesn't rank among the most-watched of the season.

Maybe a picture-perfect day and a wealth of holiday shopping sales held down the in-home crowd. But the narrow Dallas win still averaged an imposing 801,312 homes on Fox, putting it eighth on the list of 10 regular season games. It outdrew Cowboys-Dolphins on Sept. 16th (625,949 homes on Fox) and Cowboys-Rams on Sept. 30th (650,305 homes on Fox).

Sunday's game peaked at 932,835 homes in its final 15 minutes. The next closest competing attraction, ABC's telecast of NASCAR's Nextel Cup finale, sputtered in with an average of 75,504 homes.

NBC's Sunday Night Football later collided with ABC's American Music Awards, with the Patriots rout of the Bills drawing the biggest crowd from 7:15 to 9 p.m. The AMAs then took over, with Sunday Night Football barely beating CBS' third-place Shark in total homes from 9 to 10 p.m.

On Saturday night, Texas Tech's upset win over Oklahoma on ABC came close to tripling the overall audience for the Mavericks game against the Memphis Grizzlies on TXA21. The Mavs managed 73,068 homes while Tech-OU pulled in 203,830. Peak numbers for Tech-OU -- 253,302 homes -- were between 10:45 and 11 p.m.

Friday's local news wars again were dominated by Belo8. The ABC station won at 5, 6 and 10 p.m. in both total homes and with 25-to-54-year-olds, the main advertiser target audience for news programming.

Belo8 also tied Fox4 for the total homes lead at 6 a.m.. But Fox4 was comfortably on top in the 25-to-54 demo.