Friday, December 4, 2015

2015 CFB TV Facts & Figures - Big Ten

2016 will be the final year of the rights agreements the Big Ten has with ESPN and FOX (championship game only, BTN is a separate longer deal).  With 2015 being the second year of the conference's current configuration, let's drill down and look at where the conference's games landed in 2015.

* 21 games were shown on ABC either full national or via reverse mirror with ESPN2, an increase of one from 2014.  There were no regionally split games that required ESPN3 to see the game when a game was not shown on ABC.  Fourteen of the 21 were full national on ABC, an increase of four from 2014.

* Six of the seven ABC games shown on ESPN2 via reverse mirror started at 3:30pm ET.

* Four conference controlled games aired on ABC in the Saturday Night Football slot, more than any other conference who allows their games to be shown on ABC.  For the Saturday games, seven were 12pm ET starts, nine started at 3:30pm ET and the previously mentioned four at 8pm.

* After Ohio St.'s required two BTN games, every Big Ten controlled Ohio St. game aired on ABC (eight games).  None air on ESPN Networks.  Iowa and Michigan St., the two competing schools in the Big Ten championship, appeared on ABC seven times combined as part of the Big Ten TV package.

* Purdue was the only school not to appear on ABC as part of the Big Ten's TV package.  They only appeared once on ESPN or ESPN2 as well, with their Big Ten controlled games concentrated between BTN, ESPNU and ESPNEWS.

* 37 games were shown on full national on ESPN's pay TV channels, 21 of those aired on ESPN (10) or ESPN2 (11) with the remaining sixteen evenly split between ESPNU and ESPNEWS.  The 21 on ESPN and ESPN2 matched the combined total for those two networks when compared with 2014, while ESPNEWS carried three more games compared to 2014.

* BTN was scheduled to carry forty games as they were in 2014.  One minor difference was that one game had to be produced and moved to the BTN2Go streaming service (Kent St. at Illinois) due a start date change from poor weather.

No comments: