College Football Conference Battles Could Involve the Networks

Although not official (as of press time), the big change for the Big 10 Conference media rights deals to start in 2023 will be significant for both the networks and the viewers. If ESPN continues its reported bailout of the Big 10 package after the coming season, it appears the expanding Conference's football games will be shared by three over the air networks. As hard as it will be to get used to after all these years, ABC would not be one of them. Fox Sports will be continuing, while CBS and NBC are expected to have exclusive telecast windows each Saturday. 

The expectation is that Fox will continue its "early" window of Noon ET starts, and that NBC will air a prime-time game (which for this year continues on ABC). The expectation is that CBS will get the late afternoon spot of a 3:30 ET start. However, there is a catch (and it's not a wide receiver catch) for CBS in 2023. As of now, CBS is still scheduled to carry an SEC football matchup during that same time slot, even though 2023 is the final season of CBS' current contract. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

It is highly unlikely that either conference would consent to regional distribution and/or their important matchup of the week being moved to CBS Sports Network. It is also unlikely that NBC would even consider switching out of prime time to accommodate CBS. How would this be handled?

This is purely speculation, but The Broadcast Booth thinks that ESPN/ABC would step in and pick up those SEC telecasts which were supposed to go to CBS. That would clear CBS to air Big Ten games when scheduled, but at a steep cost. The hunch is that the SEC keeps the millions of dollars in revenue from CBS while ESPN gets them for a nominal fee. If ESPN truly does stay away from these negotiations, some of the best matchups for 2023 college football just might take place between the networks.

Meanwhile, as we go into the first full weekend of NFL exhibition games, the networks are getting ready for the start of the regular season. Fox Sports has revealed its announcing assignments for Week 1 (Sept. 11). Its new #1 team of Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen start with the doubleheader game between Green Bay and Minnesota. Joe Davis and Daryl Johnston will call the San Francisco at Chicago game (early), while Adam Amin and Mark Schlereth will call the Philadelphia vs. Detroit game. 

 

Fox Sports is also coming off its (8/11) telecast of the MLB Field of Dreams game. Granted, they got stuck with a meaningless game between two sub .500 teams, which gave them more reasons to distract from the game itself. Sorry, but the telecast was difficult for the hardcore baseball fan to get in to. It was more than the constant distraction by showing the happenings aside from the field of play. Having one color for the score box added to the challenge of both teams wearing uniforms which made them hard to recognize. The comparative lack of other scores and baseball news also didn't help. It's not surprising that Fox's ratings were down roughly 50% from last year, when the first ever Field of Dreams game took place and involved two contending teams. (The Fox MLB telecast did comfortably beat out the NFL exhibition game between the Giants and Patriots on NFL Network which was head to head.)

 

However, the bigger issue actually came from MLB Network earlier in the day. It was understandable that MLB Network planned an extensive pre-game show of their own to hype the event. MLB Network was airing the Cleveland vs. Detroit game, which began at 1:00 PM ET, more than six hours before the Field of Dream game's first pitch. At game time, Cleveland was leading the American League Central with two teams within three games of them. With Minnesota idle, Twins fans were among those with an interest in that telecast. Yet, because MLB Network was so locked in to their pre-game hype starting at 4 PM ET, they had the nerve to cut out of the Cleveland game just to go to their pregame programming from Iowa.

 

Although they did a couple of their "live look-ins" the rest of the way, the Cleveland vs. Detroit game was going to the 9th inning when they cut away. It so happened that the Tigers came up with two in the 9th to tie the game before Cleveland won it in the 10th. Cutting away from a live game, especially when it was close, just to have interviews, was inexcusable. If it was that important, then skip the commercials between innings and during pitching changes to cut away for the interviews. It's harder to get fans excited about division races when the official network doesn't deem live coverage important enough to wait 25 more minutes.