Welcome to the Great Gridiron Grind
The NFL and college football are rapidly colonizing the calendar. They make more money, and you get to gorge on pigskin.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, we’re clearing our schedule.
Football fans were forced to go nearly 48 hours without a live game this week, from the end of Monday Night Football until the start of Missouri State @ Middle Tennessee on Wednesday evening. But fear not, because that midweek matchup kicked off a 49-day stretch with either an NFL or FBS-level college football game on the calendar every single day.
In fact, over the course of that run, which ends on Thanksgiving Eve, there are multiple options on all but five nights.
While the NFL has long owned Sunday and the NCAA Saturday, both entities have recognized a weeklong appetite for football—and have done just about everything in their power to serve it up. Broadcasters, seeing the same trends, have opened their wallets to make it easy.
Thursdays and Mondays are now a given for the pros, with Black Friday games entering year three on Prime Video too. Though ESPN’s experiment with double Monday night affairs is unlikely to continue for long, the league and its media partners will keep looking for any TV window they can fill. The NFL now plays on some December Saturdays, and could soon have an early morning Europe kickoff on basically every week of the season. A trip to Australia next year opens up the possibility of a new Wednesday game as well.
In the meantime, colleges have rushed to grab other slices of the calendar, answering the call from a seemingly endless list of cable channels and streaming networks looking to air games nationwide as long as they feature 22 helmeted men repeatedly running into each other.
The MAC led the way with Tuesday night games, accepting empty stadiums for beefier bottom lines. No, it isn’t fun to attend a midweek November night game in Ypsilanti, but by being willing to play then, schools like Eastern Michigan now have games on ESPN and ESPN2. The conference gave them a fun marketing moniker–‘MACtion’—and they’ve become a midweek staple for fans to enjoy from the comfort (and warmth) of their couch.
“What it has done is help take what was a pretty darned good regional conference and has given it a national brand and made it a national conference,” MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher said last year. He said TV ratings jump 10x when the conference slate shifts from Saturdays to Tuesday and Wednesday.
Envious of MACtion’s success, Conference USA and the Sun Belt later followed the trend. Here’s next Tuesday’s banger lineup.
Yes, the NFL remains the TV schedule’s 800-pound gorilla, but college football is the second most valuable sports property on U.S. television, and they’re going head-to-head more than ever. Last year, for example, the newly-expanded College Football Playoff went up against the NFL on the penultimate Saturday of the year. At noon ET across the WBD networks, No. 11 SMU and No. 6 Penn State averaged 6.6 million viewers, while the Texans vs. Chiefs drew 15.5 million on Peacock/NBC. In the afternoon, No. 12 Clemson and No. 5 Texas managed 8.9 million across the WBD family, while Fox’s broadcast of the Ravens vs. Steelers drew 15.4 million. That’s a blowout, sure, but it’s also 15.5 million combined fans who chose college football over the pros.
Interestingly, there was one more college football game that night, with no pro competition, and it drew an NFL-like number. No. 1 Ohio State’s demolition of No. 9 Tennessee averaged 14.7 million across the Disney networks.
Meanwhile other sports have adjusted their calendars in response to football’s filling in of October and November evenings. The NBA’s national games skip Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday until midseason, when the football calendar relents.
The Association has also scheduled a triple-header on ESPN on football’s one upcoming off-night: the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The Players Era Festival college basketball tournament has its men’s final that night too.
Coverage of the PGA Tour’s newest event, a four-man “Skins Game” contest, will begin at 9 a.m. ET on Black Friday. The golf will wrap up before the NFL returns at 3.
On the most recent Sporticast episode, Scott and Jacob were joined by Just Women’s Sports’ Haley Rosen to discuss whether the WNBA Finals were being overshadowed by the growing feud between W players and league commissioner Cathy Engelbert—and what can be done to better amplify the on-court/on-field storylines playing out across women’s sports.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.