Miami vs. Notre Dame Week 1, 2025 Credit: ABC
By Tyler Lauletta on

On Wednesday, it was reported that ESPN was preparing a significant change to how it would present its college football broadcasts for the coming season.

The BottomLine ticker, which scrolls across the bottom of screens informing the audience of the scores of other games across college football, is no more.

“We’re always looking for ways to better serve sports fans. By removing the BottomLine during live action, we’re creating a cleaner presentation that keeps the focus where it belongs—on the field,” an ESPN spokesperson told Front Office Sports, which first reported the news.

It’s a change that Awful Announcing has called for in the past. While the score ticker was useful in its prime, the advent of smartphones has made it less necessary to track the scores of games you aren’t currently watching. Further, as the utility of the BottomLine dwindled, the way ESPN used it as ad space only became more glaring.

There was a time when we only had one screen, and getting as much information as possible from it was useful for sports fans. Today, we watch sports on a second screen, and many of us watch multiple games at once. It’s nice to live in the future.

Still, change is hard, and fans were split online upon hearing about the news. Some were excited that college football games would benefit from the cleaner look that the lack of a ticker allows a broadcast.

Others lamented the change, arguing that the move was a scheme to keep viewers from realizing that there could be more compelling games to watch elsewhere.

This argument doesn’t really stack up with how people watch sports today. If a better game is on, you usually know about it, either through social media or push notifications or a text from a buddy that reads “OMG DID YOU SEE THAT?” or simply checking a score app on your phone.

Still, it’s not surprising that people would be resistant to the shift. Many have fond memories of the BottomLine that they did not want to lose. Some simply wondered if their reaction to the news was a sign that they had finally gotten old.

And of course, there were jokes about the move simply being made in order to give Pat McAfee more time on ESPN airwaves.

Like the reaction to most changes in modern media, chances are the outrage by those who are outraged will be briefly loud and then forgotten. Maybe in the future the ticker will be an option that viewers can toggle on and off, but for now, that screen space is being given back to football.

About Tyler Lauletta

Tyler is a editorial contributor at Awful Announcing, with previous stops at Sports Illustrated and Business Insider during his career covering sports in digital media. He is, begrudgingly, a Truster of the Process and general Philly sports sicko.

View all posts by Tyler Lauletta