The Awful Announcing Wednesday Newsletter is a deep dive into all things sports media with original commentary, highlights from the week, social media buzz, and much more. Below is our “A Block” that leads off the newsletter. You can read this and more by subscribing here. We send a recap of what’s been on AA on Monday and Friday mornings as well as the extended original version on Wednesdays.
College football is a television enterprise. It’s TV networks and dollars that now control the sport. As conference realignment has unfurled in an absurd and unthinkable direction with nationwide conferences featuring the Big Ten in the Pacific Northwest and the ATLANTIC Coast Conference now being represented in the Bay Area, it’s all been done on the basis of what makes the best television. Period. It’s the TV networks paying hundreds of millions of dollars in media rights deals to conferences and schools to make the best games to attract the most viewers. That’s why an entire sport built largely on generational traditions has been blown up beyond recognition.
With that in mind, how does the sport with as much television money invested in it as college football end up with such a crappy television product like we will see this weekend?
It’s Week 3 of the college football season, a time when excitement of the new season is still with us, Cinderella stories and Heisman hopefuls emerge, and teams start to figure out where they are. It should be a time of great non-conference challenges and a few conference clashes to whet our appetites for the rest of the fall. Instead, here’s the main attractions for this college football weekend.
#7 Penn State at Illinois – 12 PM ET, Fox Big Noon Saturday
South Carolina at #1 Georgia – 3:30 PM ET, SEC on CBS
#10 Alabama at USF – 3:30 PM ET, ABC
Western Kentucky at #6 Ohio State – 4 PM ET, Fox
#11 Tennessee at Florida – 7 PM ET, SEC on ESPN
Syracuse at Purdue – 7:30 PM ET, Big Ten on NBC
Pittsburgh at West Virginia – 8 PM ET, ABC Primetime
Colorado State at #18 Colorado – 10 PM ET, ESPN Pac-12 After Dark
This is pathetic!
There are multiple games in primetime featuring unranked opponents playing against each other. Syracuse-Purdue?!?! In primetime?!?!? In 2023?!?! Are Donovan McNabb and Drew Brees going to be in uniform somehow?
Both College GameDay and Big Noon Kickoff (again) are going to be in Boulder for the Colorado-Colorado State game that won’t kick off till 10 PM ET. Why? Because they want to cash in on the Deion Sanders hype. But also… there’s nowhere else to go.
Compare this week’s slate to next week when there are six games featuring ranked teams playing one another including the blockbuster Ohio State-Notre Dame showdown, Ole Miss-Alabama, Oregon-Colorado, and more.
With all of the money the networks are spending, couldn’t someone have gotten the schedule makers together and moved a couple games around for all of our sakes? It doesn’t make any sense for one week to be so bare and the next week so fruitful. Imagine the NFL giving us Texans-Commanders at 4:25 PM on a Sunday and following it up with Bucs-Cardinals in primetime. Would you be waiting all day for Baker Mayfield and Josh Dobbs?
If there’s one thing the consolidation of college football brings next year with 18 and 16 team superconferences the norm, hopefully it’s not having any more sleepy Saturdays like this one.
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