The ESPN reveal of the 2024 CFP bracket. The ESPN reveal of the 2024 College Football Playoff bracket.
College FootballESPNBy Andrew Bucholtz on

An oft-seen element of sports television in 2024 is the idea of presenting information to TV viewers long after the decisions in question are made. That sometimes comes even long after the information in question is revealed to the public by reporters. This happens with draft shows, schedule reveal shows, and with “news” shows like SportsCenter. But it’s perhaps most notable with postseason brackets.

We’ve seen that a lot of times over the years with the CBS men’s basketball NCAA Tournament bracket reveal, with the ESPN women’s basketball tournament bracket reveal, and with ESPN’s reveal of the College Football Playoff bracket. And the latest case of the latter (and the first one involving a 12-team field) was particularly notable Sunday.

The reveal came 34 minutes into ESPN’s CFP selection show, and 35 minutes after The Action Network’s Brett McMurphy reported the only real piece of unknown information (SMU getting in over AP poll selection and “arbitrary” exclusion Alabama). And it came after ESPN’s release promoting this promised College Football Playoff rankings and brackets to be revealed within the show’s first 30 minutes.” Here’s how that looked on ESPN at 12:34 p.m. ET Sunday, with host Rece Davis even saying “I know that I’m dragging this out” before the final SMU reveal:

And here’s some of the reaction to how ESPN handled this show:

This was part of  a four-hour College Football Playoff Selection Show from ESPN on their main network. That show features Davis hosting, with analysis from Kirk Herbstreit, Joey Galloway, Booger McFarland, Greg McElroy, and Nick Saban, plus guest appearances from coaches and others.

That four-hour show is set to be followed by a three-hour Championship Drive: Rankings Reaction hosted by Matt Barrie with different analysts, with the first hour airing on ESPN and the second two airing on ESPN2. Then, Championship Drive: Bowl Breakdown hosted by Kevin Connors airing on the main ESPN network for two and a half hours beginning at 8:30 p.m. ET. So ESPN at least got the bracket out in the first hour of their nearly 10 hours of coverage (across ESPN and ESPN2) of these rankings. But they did so extremely slowly relative to when the information was known and reported.

As noted above, this is not the only case of made-for-TV specials delaying already-known information. There’s been plenty of criticism of the men’s NCAA basketball March Madness bracket reveal delay over the years, especially from 2016 to 2018 before a return to the standard earlier reveal in 2019 (which, of note, got its final teams of the 68-team field done by 45 minutes in, compared to the 34 minutes to get 12 teams out here).

There have been other bracket reveals well after the information’s known. Those include ESPNU spoiling their own company’s NCAA women’s March Madness bracket reveal by four hours in 2019. And there have been plenty of cases of reporting spoiling schedule reveal shows, as well as made-for-TV draft announcements (though the lobby against pick-tipping has caused many reporters to go away from reporting news in that latter case).

But it is interesting to see this first expanded bracket reveal take so long, And it’s notable to see that come after accurate pre-show reporting from an outside reporter on what the outcome was. And it’s significant to see the criticism for how long ESPN drew this out. We’ll see if they change their approach next year.

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.

View all posts by Andrew Bucholtz