Mike Celizic

Forget about 19-0 and all the talk about the Patriots looking to lay claim to the title of the greatest football team ever. The real test of New England’s standing in football history is how many people watch the game.

And here’s the number that counts in that battle to be not only the best team ever but also the one that the nation thinks is most worth its attention: 49.1.

That’s the record Nielson rating ever pulled by a Super Bowl, and it’s older than some of the athletes who will play in the game. It was set in 1982 when Super Joe Montana and the 49ers beat the Bengals, and it came in the middle of the Super Bowl’s greatest ratings era, when typical audiences were four or five percentage points and nearly 10 percent higher than they are now.

There was a lot of reason to watch that game. San Francisco had made it to the Super Bowl by beating America’s Team, the Dallas Cowboys, on a miraculous pass by Montana to Dwight Clark. Montana became a hero that day, and his Golden Boy looks and easy smile were magnets for non-fans, especially those of the female persuasion.

Other big ratings winners also had something other than the prospect of a great game going for them. Usually, they involved a franchise with a broad national following like the Cowboys, Packers or Steelers. Sometimes, there were outsized personalities involved, which would describe pretty much everybody on the 1985 Bears.

Those factors and not simple football excellence are what generates huge ratings, and it remains to be seen whether the Patriots and Giant have the kind of buzz that can make this game an all-time ratings champ.

And let’s be honest about this. Except for that perfect-season thing, this game doesn’t have a lot going for it personality-wise.

You have Tom Brady, your basic matinee-idol, dimple-chinned, super-model-dating, paparazzi-magnet quarterback, but after that, there aren’t a lot of exciting sidebars on that team. Randy Moss may play like Terrell Owens, but he doesn’t talk like him or generate the same level of controversy. The defense may be among the league’s best, but it doesn’t have a single player with a catchy nickname like Refrigerator, Assassin, Big Daddy or Mean Joe. Regular Joes is more the order of the day.

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Then there are the Giants, a fine team populated by players who are as likely to say anything controversial as Britney Spears is to be named Mother of the Year. Eli Manning isn’t going to moon a helicopter during practice like Jim McMahon, the wild and crazy quarterback of the 1985 Bears, did, and, while the Manning name may mean something to NFL fans, it’s not clear what — if anything — it means to the general public.

Last year, his more famous brother starred in the game along with the Bears — one of the NFL’s most famous franchises from one of the nation’s biggest cities, and yet he bumped the game’s rating up only one percentage point over the year before.

The 42.6 rating and 64 share that the Colts and Bears pulled were still the highest rating since 1998 when the Green Bay Favres took on the Denver Elways and pulled a 44.5 rating, which is the percentage of all televisions tuned to the game, and a 67 share, which is the percentage of televisions that are actually in use that were tuned in.

The NFL and FOX would probably be beyond delighted if the Pats and Giants can do a similar number, but unless they exceed a 45, all they’ve done is return to what the game used to do as a matter of course.

From 1978, when the Cowboys beat the Broncos, through 1987, when the Giants beat the Bills, the Super Bowl never pulled less than a 44.4 rating, a level it’s reached only three times since. That 1982 game also pulled a 73 share; the record for that number is 78, set in 1976 when the old Steel Curtain Steelers won their second straight Super Bowl, beating the America’s Team Cowboys.