Thursday, February 9, 2017

Notes on 2017 American Athletic Football Schedule Release & Pac-12 Pairing

Schedule

* For the moment, unless Army moves their game dates around, their home games vs. Buffalo (9/9), Temple (10/21) and Duke (11/11) should all be noon ET starts due to Navy placing home games on those dates at 3:30pm ET.  Both service academies have their home games on CBS Sports Network.

* Adding Tulsa at SMU to the fray on October 27th seems to strongly push Michigan St. at Northwestern towards FOX Sports' pool of Big Ten games unless Florida St. at Boston College is aired on ESPNU.  This could be why the Tulane at Memphis game was set for CBS Sports Network as ESPN may have other plans for ESPNU, such as a Sun Belt game.

* The flexible date of the Navy at Temple game is interesting as there is a Pac-12 game, UCLA at Utah, scheduled for Friday 11/3 as well plus Memphis at Tulsa.  FS1 has a NASCAR Truck Series race from Texas scheduled for that evening at 8:30pm ET.  If the race can finish in around 90 minutes, UCLA at Utah could start at 10pm ET / 8pm MT on FS1, but I think what you'll see is a 7pm ET / 6pm CT start for Memphis at Tulsa with UCLA at Utah following on ESPN2 and Navy at Temple moving to Thursday night.

ESPNU wasn't announced as an option for either American game.  If it is, the start times can be staggered a bit and the doubleheader could be Navy at Temple with the Pac-12 game.

* Similar to 11/3, Temple at Cincinnati could be paired with Washington at Stanford on ESPN2 as FS1 has a Truck Series race from Phoenix at 8:30pm ET.  With both 11/3 and 11/10, ESPN would likely not be available due to the NBA schedule or ESPN showing their Armed Forces Classic men's basketball game, in 2017 from Ramstein AFB in Germany.

* Per the schedule release, both Black Friday games will be on ABC or an ESPN television platform.  ESPN is still scheduling heavily for that date even though they have a fair amount of college basketball to account for on that date with Wooden Legacy & Advocare Invitational, plus the possibility of the NIT Tip Off, Battle 4 Atlantis and the new Phil Knight Invitational event taking up space.

1 comment:

Chris said...

I'm really curious as to how ESPN treats the Advocare and Wooden events this year since the fields are substantially weaker thanks to the PK80 gobbling up so many power conference teams. I suspect many of those events' games might be knocked down to ESPN3.