Heading into Week 9 of the 2024 college football season, we’ve already seen upsets galore and plenty of surprising teams hoping to make a run at the expanded College Football Playoff.
A fascinating part of college football is how widely distributed it is across different networks. Which schools are playing where have seen some notable changes this year. It started with everyone except Oregon State and Washington State exiting the Pac-12, with Oklahoma and Texas joining the SEC, ABC/ESPN taking over full SEC rights, CBS shifting their featured afternoon game to the Big Ten, The CW adding Pac-2 rights to their ACC broadcasts, TNT Sports coming in for Mountain West games, and the demise of the Pac-12 Networks and the Longhorn Network.
For those flipping around from game to game on Saturdays (or other days of the week), it can be jarring to see the dramatically different graphics packages each network uses. One easily comparable example of that is with scorebugs, often a subject of discussion on this site.
We figured it was not only worth presenting the major ones all in one place (as we did with local MLB scorebugs this April), but also asking for readers’ votes on them.
As with our announcer rankings (NFL, MLB, WNBA, and more), the bottom of this post will contain a form to vote (also available here). That form will feature a list of the scorebugs shown below and ask you to grade them individually from A to F, with A as the best grade and F as the worst. Once you’ve selected your grades, submit them. Feel free to add anonymous comments or explanations for your grades as well, but it’s not required.
This poll will run through 10 p.m. Eastern on Monday, Oct. 28. We’ll then tally the grades up to determine a final score for each scorebug and then rank them, with the rankings coming out on Thursday, Oct. 31. (The CBS/CBSSN and Fox/FS1 bugs are combined in the voting, as the only change appears to be the addition of a ticker on the cable network, but both are shown below so you can see what they look like with or without that.)
Without further ado, here are the scorebugs:
SEC on ABC
Other ABC/ESPN networks/SEC Network/ACC Network
CBS
CBSSN (CBS plus a ticker)
The CW
Fox/Big Ten Network
FS1 (Fox plus a ticker)
NBC/Peacock
TNT Sports (TNT/truTV/Max)
Here’s the voting form, again also available here:
About Andrew Bucholtz
Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.