The Big Ten and SEC are launching a joint volleyball event this fall, and Fox is giving it a primetime window on Labor Day weekend to match.
The two conferences announced the inaugural Big Ten/SEC Volleyball Challenge Week on Monday, a six-day event running Sept. 1-6 that will match up all 18 Big Ten schools against all 16 SEC institutions. The week culminates with a doubleheader at Wrigley Field on Sunday, Sept. 6 — the first time volleyball has ever been played at the ballpark — with Nebraska taking on Missouri at 6 p.m. CT and Penn State battling Kentucky at 8 p.m. CT. Both matches air live on Fox.
Wrigley Field is the obvious headline, but the Fox primetime window on a Sunday night in early September is the more significant media story, and it didn’t happen overnight. Fox Sports president and COO Mark Silverman said the network first noticed volleyball delivering strong numbers on the Big Ten Network nearly a decade ago, when BTN began pairing matches after Big Ten football because the seasons overlap. The conference and schools were eventually willing to move games from Saturday to Sunday to accommodate the strategy, and when Fox took it to the broadcast network in October 2023 — pairing Wisconsin-Minnesota and Michigan-Ohio State in windows around NFL games — the two matches combined for 1.7 million viewers, a record for college volleyball at the time.
“Seeing those numbers and how well it did really showcased the power of what women’s volleyball could be,” said Fox Sports vice president Derek Crocker. “We were really encouraged by it.”
The investment kept growing from there: last year, Fox aired a record six women’s college volleyball matches on its broadcast network and 86 matches across all its linear channels, with the Big Ten Network airing spring volleyball matches for the first time. The sport, in Fox’s framing, was still only scratching the surface. The NCAA volleyball championship on ABC last December drew 1.3 million viewers, the second-most-watched women’s college volleyball championship in history.
Sept. 6 is a departure from all of that. There’s no NFL game propping this up. It’s volleyball in primetime on Labor Day weekend — the first weekend of college football season, the day after Fox’s own Big Noon Saturday coverage — standing on its own in a window that the network is choosing to give it. That is a different kind of commitment than anything Fox has made to the sport before.
The rest of Challenge Week will air across Fox, FS1, Big Ten Network, ESPN, and SEC Network, with additional coverage on B1G+ and SECN+.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.