While the NFL dominates the sports calendar on Thanksgiving Day, college football fans had gotten used to one of the underrated rivalry games on the calendar providing a great side dish. The Egg Bowl between Ole Miss and Mississippi State has been played on Thanksgiving 23 times, including each of the last seven years.
However, the only game on the Thanksgiving college football calendar was an American Athletic Conference contest between Tulane and Memphis. As it turned out, that game had College Football Playoff implications and the upset by Memphis simplifies the CFP scenarios quite a bit.
The Egg Bowl also has some postseason ramifications and with Ole Miss on the outside looking in they desperately need a victory over their in-state rival to hold on to their faint hopes.
But instead of the game taking place on Thanksgiving night, it is instead a 3:30 p.m. ET kickoff on ABC on Black Friday. Why the change? It’s just the latest example of television rightsholders calling the shots.
As the Clarion Ledger reminded fans in the Magnolia state this week, the Egg Bowl moved off its Thanksgiving timeslot at the request of ESPN and ABC, who wanted the game for the afternoon Black Friday window.
As previously reported by the Clarion-Ledger, Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter said at an alumni event at the Country Club of Jackson in June that the game is being played on Friday because ABC wanted the game on that day compared to Thanksgiving. ABC is in its first season of a 10-year contract as the exclusive broadcast partner of the SEC.
“In that negotiation, ABC came to us and said we want this date, and we wanna play at this time,” Carter said in June. “And we actually did have a little negotiating power on another game that we got scheduled at the time we wanted on the road.”
As noted in the Ole Miss game notes, it is the first time that Egg Bowl is being played on a Friday since the 2008 season, when Ole Miss came out with the 45-0 win in Oxford.
The SEC on ABC has brought the highest ratings throughout this college football season in the first year of the new exclusive television deal with ESPN. And a 10-year, $3 billion deal allows you the privilege to call your shots when it comes to scheduling games according to your wishes.
It is an interesting decision from ESPN and ABC to make this push. The Black Friday college football calendar has traditionally been fairly crowded. And this year is no exception. Rivalry games like Georgia-Georgia Tech and Nebraska-Iowa will take place and ranked teams like Boise State and Colorado will also be in action.
However, the Egg Bowl is by far the best game in the mid-afternoon timeslot… it just so happens to be going head-to-head with the competition of the NFL’s Black Friday game on Amazon. Of course, it would have faced similar competition on Thanksgiving night with the NFL now going with a holiday tripleheader. Maybe there’s no right or wrong answer to when the game should be played, but it stands as a sizable reminder that television (and the revenue it brings) pulls most of the strings in college football.
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