A fascinating aspect of college sports is how teams within a conference are generally considered “equal” in terms of per-school payouts, but not actually equal when it comes to TV windows their fans may not like. Those TV rights and windows are generated based on the conference as a whole, but as we’ve seen over the last number of years, seemingly-more-powerful schools have significant ability to opt out of windows they’d rather not play in.
Those opt-outs can include Friday night games, Saturday noon games, and sometimes even Saturday night games. And the latter is the focus of a report from Ryan Glasspiegel of The New York Post. Here’s more from that piece, published Tuesday evening:
In a peculiar arrangement, both Ohio State and Michigan have stipulations in their TV deals with Fox, CBS and NBC that they cannot be assigned to play at night in the final three weeks of the regular season, sources told The Post.
The Buckeyes and Wolverines could choose to accommodate a request to play at night late in the season, but Michigan hasn’t agreed to that in the last two years.
While Ohio State made an exception last year for a home game against Michigan State that kicked off at night, former athletics director Gene Smith spoke out against the idea of late-season night games last June.
…A Michigan rep confirmed to The Post that the school will not be assigned late season night games.
“We have tolerances for up to two home night games per year and no night games after daylight savings time,” the rep said. “Every school has different tolerances.”
A fair bit of this was previously known, but it’s significant to see it spelled out this way. And this helps illustrate a few other things, including how NBC’s Big Ten primetime package perhaps isn’t as great as it might sound given the lack of highly-watched schools willing to play in that window.
Beyond that, this goes to reinforce how some top Big Ten schools are treated as “more equal than others.” And while there have been plenty of complaints from fans of top schools, including Ohio State, about playing in the noon window, it’s interesting to read that the administrations at those schools are also against night games late in the season. That definitely limits the windows they can play in, and perhaps leads to some more noon games.
