Credit: Sarah Phipps/THE OKLAHOMAN
By Bob Thompson on

Less AI and more AA in your search results.

Add Awful Announcing as a preferred source on Google

On November 16, 1968, the New York Jets kicked a field goal to take a 32-29 lead over the Oakland Raiders. There were 65 seconds left on the clock. NBC, which was airing the game nationally, had an automated program switch scheduled to present the movie Heidi at its originally scheduled time of 7:00 p.m. ET. At precisely 7:00 p.m., the switch happened; the Eastern and Central time zones saw the opening to Heidi, and sports TV changed forever.

The Raiders scored two touchdowns in 9 seconds and won the game 43-32. Only viewers in the Mountain and Pacific time zones saw the game to completion, except in the San Francisco/Oakland DMA, where the game was unavailable due to the NFL’s then-existing blackout policy.

The outrage over the game led the AFL and NFL (pre-merger) to adopt several contractual provisions to ensure this would not happen again. The most relevant was the “show to conclusion” rule, which ensured that a network would not leave the telecast before the game was over. Some provisions exist for blowouts and a few other situations, but the rule remains firmly in effect for NFL games today.

There is no such hard and fast rule in the world of college football, and maybe there should be!

Two Weeks of College Football Chaos

I bring this up because of a few programming moves during the first two weeks of the college football season. The first was during the Oregon State-Houston game on September 5. ESPN cut away from the game with Houston holding a 26-20 lead with 9:15 left in the fourth quarter to join the season opener between the Texas Longhorns and Texas State. Oregon State-Houston was moved to ESPNEWS and the ESPN App. Viewers were incensed that ESPN moved a competitive game that many had invested three and a half hours in for the start of what was likely to be a lopsided blowout.

The following week, a similar situation occurred when ESPN moved a tight game between Oregon and Oklahoma State to ESPN2 and ESPNEWS to start the US Open women’s singles finals on time. At the time, the heavily favored Ducks were down by three points midway through the fourth quarter. To start US Open coverage on time, Oregon-Oklahoma State moved to ESPN2, ESPNEWS, and the ESPN App. To make matters worse, near the end of that game, ESPN2 switched over to the start of the weather-delayed UCF-Pitt game that was initially scheduled for the network.

How does this happen? What type of contingencies does a network prepare for? Who makes the call to move a game prior to its conclusion or delay the airing of a game previously scheduled for that window? Are network executives just plain stupid? Are they just madmen who hide behind a curtain, pushing buttons and laughing about how they just ruined a bunch of people’s Saturday afternoon?

First, this isn’t a bash-ESPN story. I felt ESPN was pretty upfront with viewers and did a reasonable job informing fans what they were doing and why over the first two weekends of the season. These two games are just the latest example of what has happened to every network out there. If you are programming a sports-only network with games that don’t always fit into a predetermined time slot, you’re at significantly more risk than non-sports-only outlets. But game overruns happen to every network at some point. And when it happens to you, it is an extremely uncomfortable position to be in.

Inside the Network Playbook

When I was at Fox Sports, we had preset parameters for the steps we’d take in certain situations likely to occur during the season, whatever the sport. Every network has these contingency plans. They don’t necessarily cover every possible scenario, but they do cover most.

Here’s the game plan we ran during my time at Fox:

  1. First and foremost, whenever possible, finish what you start. Don’t dump out of a game in progress, especially when the outcome is in doubt.
  2. If you are going to bleed into another timeslot, first try to delay the start of that event. If that’s not possible, move it to another outlet for the start and ultimately return it to its scheduled channel.
  3. Always try to inconvenience the fewest people. Sometimes that runs counter to the “finish what you start” rule, but not often.
  4. Respect the local markets of the participating teams whenever possible.
  5. If you are contractually obligated to a hard-window start at a particular time, do it. The only exception is if the property gives you permission not to televise from the start.
  6. If you move a game to a different outlet, try to ensure that it is distributed to as many homes and at a comparable level of service as the originally intended channel carried.
  7. Look at ad-revenue load for affected games. This is a business after all.
  8. When in doubt, make some phone calls.
  9. Remember rule No. 1!

With this list in mind, you can usually decide whether to switch or air the event to completion. Different networks assign different people to these critical decisions, and that can change depending on the event’s relative importance. Some combination of the Coordinating or Executive Producer and Senior Programming and Acquisition executives, who live daily in the college football world, are most often tasked with making the call.

How ESPN Could Have Handled It

Oregon State-Houston suffered a 30-minute weather delay in the third quarter. This bled into the scheduled start of the Texas State-Texas game. At 3:30 p.m. ET, ESPN moved Oregon State-Houston to ESPNEWS so that Texas State-Texas could start on time on ESPN’s main feed. The game was also available on the ESPN app. The move occurred with 9:15 remaining in the game, and Houston leading 26-20. Viewers who had invested more than three hours watching the game scrambled to find ESPNEWS, which is available in one-third fewer homes than ESPN. ESPN2 wasn’t an option because it was airing the US Open. Viewers were understandably upset and took to social media to express their displeasure with the move.

I’m sure ESPN had its reasons, but dumping out of Oregon State-Houston was a bad move. It was 96 degrees at kickoff in Austin, so I can imagine the schools were reluctant to delay. If a delay wasn’t possible, the Texas State-Texas game should have started on ESPNEWS and the ESPN app, remaining there until Oregon State-Houston finished.

But the move shouldn’t have surprised anyone. ESPN did the same thing last season when a one-point Texas A&M-Arkansas game moved to ESPNEWS at halftime so the Texas-Kentucky game could air from kickoff on ESPN. Aggie and Razorback fans, rightly so, went ballistic. Yes, Texas and Arch Manning are huge draws, but ESPN might want to rethink this move.

Then, one short week later, we saw a similar incident at the Oregon-Oklahoma State game. Lightning delayed the game by 90 minutes. The final of the US Open women’s singles final was set to start at 4:00 p.m. ET. Because the event is distributed worldwide, ESPN could not delay the start. ESPN was contractually obligated to air the event from its start. After Wimbledon, it is probably the year’s most important tennis event. The US Open is extremely important to ESPN and provides more than 170 hours of live programming on the ABC and ESPN linear networks, and 1000+ hours on the ESPN app. The network had no choice but to cut the football game short to start the tennis match.

I was watching ESPN’s DirecTV feed when the switch happened. The game was moved to ESPNEWS and continued on the ESPN app. After the initial switch, Oregon-Oklahoma State was also added to ESPN2 because the UCF-Pitt game was also weather-delayed. That meant viewers without ESPNEWS initially lost the game, then got it back on ESPN2, then lost it again when they switched ESPN2 back for the start of the UCF-Pitt game. Talk about whip-lashing your viewers.

Given tennis’s hard-start requirement, the smarter move might have been to switch the Oregon-Oklahoma State game to ESPN2 in place of UCF-Pitt, since that game was already in a 65-minute delay that pushed the start to 4:35 p.m. Leave it there until conclusion. If Oregon-Oklahoma State finishes before the 4:35 p.m. start, nobody misses a thing (the Oregon-Oklahoma State game finished at 4:20 p.m., giving ESPN2 plenty of time to start the UCF-Pitt at the new scheduled start time). If the game had run past the 4:35 p.m. kickoff time, you would start UCF-Pitt on ESPNEWS and switch it to ESPN2 once Oregon-Oklahoma State is done. You would have maintained similar distribution numbers and carriage levels as ESPN for the entire Oregon-Oklahoma State game.

The Reality of Early-Season Scheduling

In the ESPN games of the last two weeks, significant weather delays contributed to both games running long. They were also early games, so as often happens with morning airline delays, the problems tend to compound later in the day. Early-season college football is tough to schedule because of the sheer number of games. This stems from a multitude of FBS vs. FCS non-conference games and the lack of early-season bye weeks.

Time to dust off those contingency plans in the college football television world. You surely don’t want to be behind the next “Heidi” incident.

Bob entered the television business in 1981, when he sold his first cable subscriptions to a nice lady in Aloha, Oregon. In 1989, he moved to the programming side with Liberty Sports’ RSN group. Liberty Sports was later sold to Fox, where he rose to President of Fox Sports Networks and Fox Sports International. He stepped down from full-time work at Fox Sports in 2009 but remained an advisor through 2015. He continues to work in the industry through his company, Thompson Sports Group LLC.