Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Some brief notes on CFB TV selections for 9/24

Full schedule for Week Four

* Florida St. at USF will air on ABC & Iowa at Rutgers will air on ESPN2.  What is in flux is whether Iowa at Rutgers will be upgraded to be a reverse mirror on ABC with Florida St. at USF and that will be decided after the Week Three results.  Florida St. at USF will not be pushed to air nationally on ESPN2.  It will be on ABC for either some or all of the country.  In either case, both games will be distributed nationally on TV somewhere.  This isn't a case where both could be split regional on ABC with ESPN3 the only other way to see the game not in your area.

* Either Penn St. at Michigan or Wisconsin at Michigan St. airing at 12pm ET on BTN shouldn't be too surprising at the end of the day.  BTN can leapfrog ahead of ESPN and/or ESPN2 a few times a year and it looks like this was one of those weeks they elected to do so.  This would be one of the Big Ten's six day holds being used.

* To allow Stanford at UCLA to air on ABC at 8pm ET / 5pm PT, an adjustment had to be made to the Pac-12 Networks initial TV windows for 9/24, which included a 3pm PT window.  The Pac-12 worked with their TV partners in the offseason to allow Pac-12 Networks telecast windows to overlap into broadcast network exclusive windows, which are loosely defined as evening telecast windows on ABC and FOX.  To do this, the early window could not start later than 2:30pm local time / 5:30pm ET, which is where Colorado at Oregon was placed.  Conversely, the Pac-12 and ESPN may have worked to move the later Pac-12 Networks windows (Washington at Arizona) thirty minutes back to 10:30pm ET / 7:30pm PT, which fans in Tuscon may not mind early in the season.

* Typically hockey games on TV fall into 2.5 hour telecast windows, so it makes sense to bump up the start time of California at Arizona St. by fifteen minutes where it will follow a World Cup of Hockey game that will start at 7pm ET.

* Blah, blah, blah, yap, yap, grumble, grumble: You'll probably need to watch the start of Arkansas vs. Texas A&M on a channel other than ESPN or online with it starting at 9pm and the LSU at Auburn game at 6pm on ESPN.

* The Sun Belt will have two of their conference controlled Saturday games on ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU during in 2016 for the first since 2010.  In 2010 and 2006, both Saturday games aired on ESPNU.

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