Disney+ gets ESPN College Football simulcasts, but not its biggest games

Disney+ is officially getting more college football in 2026, but fans shouldn’t expect ESPN to hand over its biggest games just yet.

ESPN announced on Tuesday that Disney+ will stream two college football games per week this fall, while also continuing to stream College GameDay, which debuted on the platform last year.

The network first revealed the college football simulcasts during Disney’s Q3 earnings call earlier this month, but didn’t provide any details about which games would be included. The move is part of ESPN’s broader effort to make Disney+ a “marketplace of sports” and give fans another single destination for its programming.

There is, however, a pretty significant caveat: ESPN’s biggest college football games won’t be simulcast on Disney+, at least based on the schedule announced so far. ESPN unveiled the Disney+ simulcasts for Week 0 and the first three weeks of the regular season, and none of the games fall into ABC’s Saturday night primetime window. That’s where ESPN generally puts its biggest college football game of the week, including the Ohio State-Texas matchup in Week 2.

Instead, Disney+ will carry one noon game and one 3:30 p.m. game each week. In Weeks 0 through 2, that means the noon game on ESPN and the 3:30 p.m. game on ABC, while Week 3 features two ESPN games in those windows.

Other than the time slots, there doesn’t appear to be much of a pattern to the selections. The Big 12, SEC and ACC will all have home games simulcast on Disney+, beginning with the Aer Lingus College Football Classic between North Carolina and TCU in Week 0, and also includes the Aflac Kickoff Game between Baylor and Auburn in Week 1. Other games include Oregon State-Houston (Week 1), Oregon-Oklahoma State (Week 2), Alabama-Kentucky (Week 2) and North Carolina-Clemson (Week 3).

Those are still good games, don’t get us wrong, but they are not at the Ohio State-Texas level of draw. None of the chosen games will be the site of College GameDay, for example.

Overall, though, this seems like a good move for casual college football fans, who probably would be tuned into whatever ESPN or ABC had in those time slots anyway and don’t care much about the specifics of the teams playing. For fans trying to follow a specific team, a subscription to ESPN Unlimited, which includes access to all of ESPN’s college football games, will likely be required to catch all or most of your team’s games.