SEC on ABC logo Credit: ESPN

The 2024 college football season is one marked by change. Marquee teams like Texas and Oklahoma finally transitioned from the Big 12 to the SEC, and West Coast teams like USC, UCLA, Washington, and Oregon all made their way to the Big Ten.

On the television front, the sport’s “new normal” began in earnest. CBS lost its iconic Saturday afternoon SEC on CBS package the network had aired since 1996 but picked up a full complement of Big Ten games. Disney entered its first year as the exclusive rights partner for the SEC, with all games airing on ABC or the ESPN family of networks. NBC’s primetime Big Ten package entered its second year. And Fox continues as the Big Ten’s lead broadcast partner.

For fans, not much has changed other than what network you might flip to or who is calling the game. But for the networks, and even the industry writ large, these media rights agreements come with massive ramifications.

One of the preeminent media narratives so far this college football season is the success of Disney’s new SEC on ABC package. So far this season, ABC has scored 11 of the top 14 college football audiences with CBS, Fox, and NBC rounding out the list with just one game each. ABC is the only network to have any game reach over ten million viewers this season, which it has done three times. And through eight weeks of the regular season, ABC is dominating every other broadcast network in total viewership.

ABC’s Saturday college football telecasts are averaging 5.85 million viewers through eight weeks this season, over two million more than any other broadcast network. For comparison, NBC is averaging 3.38 million viewers, CBS is averaging 3.13 million, and Fox is averaging 2.62 million.

Those numbers alone don’t tell the entire story. NBC and CBS have aired fewer than half the number of games that ABC has this season. So ABC is maintaining a substantially higher average audience across more than double the broadcast windows, an impressive feat.

Fox, for its part, has aired about the same number of games as ABC but lags behind in average viewership because it broadcasts games that kick off at 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. on the East Coast and attract smaller audiences.

ABC is up a ridiculous 41% in viewership versus the same point last year when the network was averaging 4.15 million viewers per window. No doubt, the new SEC package is helping them along. But perhaps overlooked in this analysis is the decline of Disney’s other premier college football destination: ESPN.

This season, Saturday ESPN college football games have averaged an audience of 1.86 million viewers across 36 television windows. That is down substantially from the same point last season when ESPN was averaging 2.53 million across 32 television windows. That’s good for a 26% decline year-over-year.

Much of this can be accounted for by Disney’s decision to shift SEC games that would traditionally air on ESPN over to ABC. Through this point in 2023, ABC had aired just three games from its old SEC package (meaning games hosted by an SEC school, excluding Texas and Oklahoma who had not yet joined). This season, ABC has already aired 22 games from its SEC package.

This makes sense. Disney now has the conference’s best games, and there are more teams in the conference, which creates more inventory. But some of this shift to broadcast has come at the expense of ESPN.

Last year, ESPN aired 15 SEC games through this point in the season. This year the network has aired just 14 games so far, despite the increased inventory from Texas and Oklahoma. That might not seem like a big difference, but the real disparity can be seen in the quality of games ESPN has aired this year as compared to last.

Looking at the three most-watched SEC audiences on ESPN through this point last season, you’d get Tennessee-Florida (5.31 million), LSU-Ole Miss (3.72 million), and Alabama-Arkansas (3.43 million). This year, the top three SEC audiences on ESPN so far are Florida-Tennessee (3.25 million), Florida-Mississippi State (2.64 million), and USF-Alabama (2.58 million). That’s a substantial decline year-over-year both in viewership and quality of matchup.

Why does it matter if Disney decides to air a game on ABC versus ESPN in the first place? Well, it signifies the continuance of a trend that has cable and satellite operators like Comcast and DirecTV in a tizzy.

ESPN commands the highest carriage fees of any television network. Reports indicate that cable and satellite operators pay upwards of $10 per subscriber to provide ESPN to customers. When Disney decides to move its most valuable programming off of ESPN and onto ABC, which can be accessed for free over-the-air without a pay-TV subscription, it devalues the cable or satellite bundle that customers pay for.

And when customers pay more for less, they cut the cord at increasingly fast rates.

Disney has been one of the worst offenders recently when it comes to what some in the industry refer to as “leakage,” or moving premium content from cable to broadcast television.

During the 2023 NFL season, Disney opted to simulcast its entire schedule of Monday Night Football games on ABC despite the package having been agreed to as a cable exclusive (aside from a few ABC games each year). That was because last year’s Hollywood strikes prevented original content from being produced on schedule, and ABC found itself in a bind. But it opened the door for further leakage.

This year, after originally only scheduling a handful of MNF games as ABC simulcasts, the company announced in the middle of the season that it would add six additional simulcasts to its schedule. MNF is arguably the most valuable content ESPN owns, and it is now giving it away for free over-the-air.

Last year, Disney decided to broadcast the men’s final of the U.S. Open on ABC after the event had aired exclusively on cable for years. Now, there’s speculation that the men’s final of Wimbledon could do the same in 2025 after tournament organizers announced scheduling changes that would seemingly accommodate ABC’s scheduling preferences.

Later this college football season, ABC will simulcast the College Football Playoff for the first time when it airs two first-round games in the expanded format. The College Football Playoff has aired exclusively on ESPN for its entire history before this season.

Suffice it to say that Disney is not being shy about its new programming strategy. But the leakage of its premier college football inventory is likely to perturb pay-TV distributors much more than a one-off tennis event.

College football has been the bedrock of ESPN programming for decades. Outside of the NFL, college football is the most popular sport in America and is much of the reason distributors are willing to pay ESPN’s expensive carriage fees. The calculus becomes much more difficult for distributors when the network is swapping Alabama and Georgia games on ESPN for low-wattage schools like Vanderbilt and Mississippi State.

Along with devaluing its own cable network, Disney’s viewership success this season isn’t as clear-cut as many have made it out to be. Through the first eight weeks of last season, games on ABC and ESPN combined to average 3.24 million viewers over 57 telecasts. This season, the combined average is 3.49 million viewers over 61 telecasts, a slight increase that was boosted by last week’s strong viewership. Prior to the big numbers from last week, combined ABC/ESPN viewership was actually down year-over-year.

For Disney, the story is still a positive. The SEC on ABC has dominated every other network’s college football programming so far this year, and it’s not particularly close. Disney has made the calculated decision to sacrifice some of ESPN’s strength in favor of ABC. That sacrifice may not be apparent to the average viewer, but you can bet pay-TV distributors are paying attention.

Increasingly, the cost-benefit analysis that networks are assessing favors the reach of broadcast over the protection of cable assets. But the cable bundle can only atrophy for so long. College football signifies a big piece of what’s left holding the bundle together.

Disney opting to put its best stuff on ABC at the expense of ESPN is just one more indicator that the bundle as we know it will be gone soon.

About Drew Lerner

Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.