volleyball scheduling issues
ESPNNCAABy Ben Koo on

One of the more under-the-radar sports media stories this year has been the ratings performance of women’s college volleyball.  Earlier this year, Nebraska’s volleyball team outdrew more viewers than the football team did for an earlier season game on the same network (both games on Big Ten Network). Likewise Fox, aired women’s volleyball after a NFL game earlier this fall and was rewarded with around 1.7 million viewers, another sign of ratings momentum.

With ESPN moving the NCAA women’s volleyball championship game to ABC this upcoming Sunday, this seemed to be a banner year for a sport that seems to have a lot of interest on the television side.  Fox and BTN have been promoting and building the sport, and there is some thought that the NCAA Championship bundle of  television rights that ESPN pays for (which excludes men’s basketball and football) could see women’s basketball and perhaps softball and volleyball sold individually so that they can be better monetized and promoted. (But there is some skepticism as to how viable the larger championship bundle would be without these sports.)

However, this past Saturday was a reminder that the growing sport still faces challenges in terms of exposure and accessibility. This past Saturday, ESPNU was set to air all four Elite Eight games, which featured a robust lineup of games and dedicated fanbases. Unfortunately, how that went down left many fans with a bitter taste in their mouths.

The primary issue was that ESPN crammed the highly anticipated matches in two-hour windows that were to be played in succession on ESPNU, starting at 4pm ET. While some fans took issue with the initial premise that the matches were not on more available and prominent channels like ESPN and ESPN2 (both of which are in around 70 million households, versus 50 million for ESPNU), it got worse from there. What unfolded was an unfortunate, albeit predictable, chain of events in which all four games required fans to nimbly move to find their games on standalone over-the-top pay platform ESPN+ or ESPNEWS, a channel even less available then ESPNU and not tracked in Nielsen carriage estimates.

Even before Saturday, many fans knew the setup was likely to be a disaster.

 

Below is a look at how the schedule was planned with the first game, Louisville versus Pittsburgh, starting at 4pm, and the last game starting at 10pm.

Even without a game ahead of Louisville vs. Pitt, things did not start off well as a basketball game going beyond its two hour window left fans having to navigate to find their game.

https://twitter.com/s_rawls/status/1733596093756092842

What game, you ask?

Down two sets to none, Pitt rallied to win three straight sets.  The five-set victory overlapped by nearly 50 minutes into the planned 6pm start of Nebraska versus Arkansas.

For context, only a 3 set match is guaranteed to fit into the two-hour windows ESPN had scheduled. Four-set matches will almost always be longer than two hours by anywhere from a handful of minutes to half an hour or so.  Five-set matches typically clock in around three hours.

With fans having to either potentially download and signup for ESPN+ or have ESPN News, industrious reporter Erin Sorensen got rather creative in filling the void with images during the time when many fans were unable to watch before ESPNU finally joined the match in the second set.

Nebraska beat Arkansas in four sets, right around 30 minutes past their allotted two-hour window. That meant Oregon and Wisconsin viewers missed almost the entire first set of their match.

Wisconsin would go onto win their match three sets to one, in a match that also went over their two-hour window by 30 minutes. That led to Texas and Stanford fans missing the entire  first set of their match. Additionally, it seems viewers on Hulu had the broadcast just end altogether before the match was over.

https://twitter.com/marlolundaktv/status/1733690207201902762

If you do the math, between the four matches there were 17 sets of volleyball. Somewhere between four to five of those sets were overlapped by the previous match or the college basketball blue blood matchup of Grand Canyon vs. Liberty.

Yes, these matches could be found on a different channel or ESPN+. But there is considerable leakage in audience because either fans don’t have those platforms or there’s friction to adding an extra cable package or downloading an app and signing up. ESPN communicated to Awful Announcing that while Saturday was unfortunate, it’s been a positive year for them with the sport citing the following datapoints.

  • 2023 was ESPN’s most-watched women’s volleyball regular season – averaged 116,000 viewers on ESPN Networks (up 58% YoY
  • This weekend, the schedule will feature both semis on ESPN and ESPN+, and the Champ Game on ABC (and ESPN+) for the first time ever.

Scheduling the bajillion events ESPN is contracted to air is no doubt a massive headache. But this was clearly a case that the schedule itself was only going to cause problems for the network and piss off fans. And those were foreseeable problems.

While I know we’ll have some sneering replies and comments from people who only seem to comment on articles like this one (discussion of women’s sports), the ratings data and interest from a sports media standpoint in growing women’s volleyball has a lot of documentable data and momentum.  While we have no idea if ESPN will retain the women’s volleyball tournament package, it’s not doing itself and the sport any favors being setting up one of the biggest days of the year for the sport for failure. It’s certainly not going unnoticed by fans either.

We’ll see what happens with women’s volleyball TV coverage going forward. But this wasn’t a good day for it.

About Ben Koo

Owner and editor of @AwfulAnnouncing. Recovering Silicon Valley startup guy. Fan of Buckeyes, A's, dogs, naps, tacos. and the old AOL dialup sounds

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