Not even the people who run the television networks know where this is all going.
ESPN plans to launch its direct-to-consumer streaming app next year, as bundled entertainment continues to flee traditional cable. The NFL, meanwhile, is in advanced talks to take an equity stake in ESPN while handing over NFL Media as part of the exchange. CBS lost the SEC but welcomed the Big Ten. The 12-team playoff will turn the college bowl season on its head. NBC put an NFL playoff game entirely behind a paywall for the first time ever.
It’s a lot, and it can get confusing. So let’s go with what we’re sure of:
American broadcasters will never – ever – run out of appetite for football as programming. It’s strictly going to be a matter of format and delivery method.
The latest affirmation of this truth comes from Fox Sports, which announced last week that it will add a full season of Friday night NCAA football broadcasts to its existing college package beginning this fall. That pretty much seals the deal for football junkies, as every day of the week except Tuesday and Wednesday will now have a rock-solid college or pro football broadcast component throughout the season.
From Monday Night Football all the way around to Sunday Night Football, viewers are covered. Fox plans for its Friday NCAA package to feature games from the Big Ten, Big 12 and Mountain West conferences, with exact matchups and broadcaster assignments TBA. The partner networks meet in May to divvy up the best college games.
This all comes in the wake of the best season ever for Fox’s Big Noon Saturday, which averaged an industry-leading 6.7 million viewers in 2023 – an 8% increase over the previous season.
It also schedules Fox into a three-day football bender every weekend through the season. “Our goal this fall is to have the No. 1 college football game on both Fridays and Saturdays and the top NFL game on Sundays,” said Michael Mulvihill, president of insight and analytics (yes, that’s his job title) for the Fox Corporation.
Setting aside the implications of college football cutting into high schools’ longstanding Friday Night Lights traditions around the country, this is really basic TV economics. Football programming is such a no-brainer that Fox was willing to relinquish the rights to WWE’s popular Friday Night SmackDown, which the network has broadcast for five years, in order to make room for college grid. SmackDown will move to the NBC Universal-owned USA Network in October.
Still, it’ll be interesting to see to what extent folks will tune in on Fridays to watch the college game. That is an act with no history attached to it, and traditionally Friday night is second only to Saturday night as the worst day to try to draw TV audience.
But that word – traditionally – isn’t really useful here. Too much has changed for that. What remains consistent is how well sports are positioned to grab ratings points and, eventually, paywall conversions.
And football is still king. Just ask ESPN, which last month agreed to pay $7.8 billion over six years for the rights to the expanded College Football Playoff even as it tries to hammer out the details of its looming streaming service.
With USC and UCLA joining the Big Ten this season along with Oregon and Washington, Fox will have access to some high-profile, visually appealing Friday night West Coast broadcasts. And part of the plan, undoubtedly, is to give the network momentum heading into its weekend programming showdowns with ESPN/ABC’s new SEC football property, as that conference adds Oklahoma and Texas.
But it’d be hard to lose, no matter what. Fox is cementing its reputation as a destination for both college and pro football fans, and it already enjoys the leverage of splitting the NFL’s late-afternoon Sunday window (generally the most highly-rated slot of any NFL weekend) with CBS.
As a viewer, meanwhile, you win – at least until whole batches of games start ducking behind paywalls. And if five days a week of college/pro football broadcasts doesn’t fill you up, worry not: For eight weeks in the middle of last year’s NCAA season, ESPN threw games from the Sun Belt, MAC and Conference USA onto their Tuesday and Wednesday schedules.
So long as you have absolutely no concern about what that is doing to the college players being asked to serve as the fodder for that weeknight television programming, you’re all set. The numbers are in, and they tell the same story they’ve been telling for decades: If you broadcast football, you’ll probably be just fine.
Mark Kreidler is a national award-winning writer whose work has appeared at ESPN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. He’s also a sports-talk veteran with stops in San Francisco and Sacramento, and the author of three books, including the bestselling “Four Days to Glory.” More of his writing can be found at https://markkreidler.substack.com. He is also reachable on Twitter @MarkKreidler.
