Tuesday, November 27, 2018

2018 American Athletic TV Facts & Figures

NOTE: For the purposes of these statistics, I counted the games that were played.  Not the games that ended up being cancelled due to weather or other issues.  This also does not include the network placement of any conference championship game.  For the American, Navy home games were excluded from this count because they fell under a separate contact with CBS Sports that was signed while the academy was an independent.

Here's the games that were counted, excluding the section labeled Navy Telecasts.


Some statistical items
* The Cincinnati at UCF game marked the first matchup between schools in the currently constituted Group of 5 schools to play on ABC in primetime on a full national basis.
* The six games airing on ABC either full national or partially is the highest number of games to air on broadcast television from the conference, beating the previous high of four in 2015.  Of interest is that the conference had a rare split window where two of their games were distributed regionally at the same time on ABC with the other game on ESPN2, so they aired six games over five separate broadcast network windows.
* The four intraconference regular season games is by far the most the conference has had aired on ABC in a single season, beating the number from the past five seasons combined (3 from 2013-2017).
* As mentioned earlier, Navy's number is low due to the separation of their home games under a separate contract.  This is also why Houston, Temple and Tulsa did not reach double digits for appearances within the American's TV agreement.
* UCF, as pictured above, was the only school to make all of their linear TV appearances within the four primary TV networks for the conference.  No appearances on ESPNEWS or CBS Sports Network.
* UCF's game vs. Cincinnati was the first Saturday ABC regular season game for the Knights since 2013 when they hosted South Carolina.
* The number of games on ESPNEWS declined by one from 2017.
* ESPN3 and regional TV were lumped together since the majority of viewers outside of the areas watching it in linear TV may have viewed the games via ESPN3.  The same two schools who aired games on regional or local TV were the same who did it in 2017 (Connecticut & Memphis).
* Not included here is the Cincinnati vs. Miami (OH) game played at Paul Brown Stadium.  Three games from 2018-2026 will be played there and Miami (OH) was considered the home team, so the game is listed as a MAC controlled game.
* To see Cincinnati be skipped by ESPN and ESPN2 is a bit surprising, but the conference only had three games selected for those two networks during the season.  The number of Saturday & special date games to be selected to air on the four primary TV networks are as follows:

  • ABC: 4
    • National: 2
    • Reverse mirror: 2
  • ESPN: 1
  • ESPN2: 2
  • ESPNU: 15

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just FYI - You list Cincinnati with zero games on ESPN, but according to UC's website, the game against UCLA was on ESPN.

Matt Sarzyniak said...

That game counts for the Pac-12 as it was a UCLA home game.