Monday, January 12, 2015

CFB schedule shuffle time, possible dates for Gavitt Tipoff & ACC schedule coming soon

* Mentioned this in the previous blog article, but I suspect that some CFB schedule decisions, alterations, etc. for '15 will start to come out over next few weeks.  What I'm specifically referring to is where schools will move a game to a different week and that ESPN, FOX and others will be either officially or unofficially cited as the reason for the change.

Two events where a lot of schedule makers will be in place would be to discuss these changes:

1) CFB Playoff Championship.  The bowl games themselves last week plus tonight's game no doubt has some ESPN personnel on hand plus ADs and other folks assigned to put together schedules. 

and 

2) The NCAA convention starting Wednesday in Maryland.  Again, plenty of schedule makers.  Since its the NCAA convention and not just the FBS schools, FCS schools may also be working the floor to help fill a schedule.

In both cases, I believe the ability to meet face-to-face can help speed up the process.  It is also the time where a school may try to break an agreement to take on a different opponent, and those discussions can occur with everyone in the room.

* FBSchedules passed along a tweet that noted the ACC schedule for '15 should be out in late January.  The conference's weeknight schedule, along with the weeknight schedules for the American, Conference USA and Mountain West, should provide a bit of a framework for who will have the weeknight games for the Big 12 and Pac-12.  One item the ACC doesn't have to worry about for this year is who to place in their Labor Day game since Ohio St. at Virginia Tech will be the game.  In the past, ACC schools have had to move around non-conference games to free themselves up to play on Labor Day.

* Right now, I'm expecting the Gavitt Tipoff games for the Big East & Big Ten to be held from November 10-13 based on the days of the week matching the 2009-10 season and the press release stating the games would be from Tuesday-Friday from the first full week of the season..  With that said, I would not expect FOX Sports 1 to show a Thursday or Friday CFB night game that week.  Currently, the only weeknight game set aside from the Big 12 & Pac-12 is the USC at Colorado game.  

FOX Sports 1, in addition to the Gavitt Tipoff, also has NASCAR Truck series races on the first three Fridays in November.  The race on 11/13 is from Phoenix, so that race could conceivably follow a basketball game on FS1.  Note that the last time FOX tried that was their first MBK game on FS1 between Boston College & Providence, which started at 6pm ET & went to OT, pushing the Truck prerace show to FS2 & possibly part of the race (sorry, those brain cells are gone).

Anyways, USC at Colorado seems to be destined for one of the ESPN networks.  Probably ESPN2 if the NBA on ESPN is on the schedule.  Having the Gavitt Tipoff games the following week could be problematic with FS1 because of the truck race on 11/20 in the eastern time zone (Homestead).

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

hopefully bc vs new mexico state cancel or move to another year is made official soon with replacement lined up since that's the only non conference game needing to be finalized with acc

BWBarefoot said...

As I remember it, the Nov. 2013 truck series race from Phoenix wasn't shown AT ALL (sorry for the shouting, there's no way to italicize text in this form) until the college basketball game ended. Fox Sports 2 had a Big East basketball game as well (Villanova hosted ?)

BWBarefoot said...

I have just seen the truck series schedule from Jayski and it shows that the season finale Ford EcoBoost 200 from Homestead-Miami Speedway will start at 9 p.m. ET; the normal start time is either 7 or 7:30. The only logical reason for holding the green flag back this late would be to show another live sports event at 7, so a game in the Gavitt Tip-Off could go there.

Matt Sarzyniak said...

Jayski was incorrect. Start time is at 8pm per NASCAR release today.

http://www.nascar.com/en_us/camping-world-truck-series/schedule.html