Thursday, January 17, 2019

Quick Notes on Weeknight 2019 ACC Football Games & Other Topics

* It was previously announced that the Clemson at Georgia Tech game would lead off the ACC Network football schedule.  For the other Friday night games, I do wonder if the ACC Network will show a few of them instead of airing them on ESPN or ESPN2.

If ACC Network does carry any Friday night games, candidates for that network could be Utah St. at Wake Forest on August 30th, William & Mary at Virginia on September 7th and Pittsburgh at Syracuse on October 18th.  The reason for including the last game is because of my belief that Ohio St. at Northwestern would be on ESPN on that evening as FS1 would be in the middle of their MLB postseason coverage and FOX has WWE programming.

Once the American's schedule is released, this could become clearer.

The other Friday night game that may have had its network accounted for is Penn St. at Maryland on September 27th.  FS1 has aired a Friday night Big Ten game in late September each of the past two seasons and this assumes that the Duke at Virginia Tech game, scheduled for the same evening, airs on ESPN.

* There's something up with Eleven Sports, the smaller sports network that took over the placement of One World Sports in the US a few years ago.  Eleven is the rightsholder for UMass athletics (primary for some sports like football, secondary for men's basketball) along with Big Sky & Southland conferences.  They also simulcast AggieVision telecasts from New Mexico St.

Over the past month, Eleven has been slowly cancelling men's basketball productions from the Big Sky and Southland on a rolling two week basis.  Last week, UMass announced that the remaining productions that were scheduled to air on Eleven Sports, with regional coverage in New England on NESN, would shift exclusively to NESN.
There's plenty of coverage of Eleven's international carriage issues & loss of rights.  CNBC has info on losing exclusive UFC rights in the UK and have been vocal about the possibility of pirated content with respect to the Italian Super Cup.

My own experience with Eleven has not been fruitful in terms of getting any questions answered about the channel, so whatever you see online is no different that what I end up finding online.  The long term prospects of the channel don't seem positive though.

* As first reported by Sports Business Journal, the Big 12 football championship will not be carried by FOX this year or future odd numbered years.  I wrote a short piece on it earlier this week & encourage you to seek out SBJ's work on the subject.

* The MEAC has reached an agreement with FloSports to carry several sports, including a handful of men's basketball games plus their conference basketball tournament, except for the championship game on ESPN's linear TV platforms.  In prior seasons, ESPN3 carried the conference tournament games that FloSports is picking up.

* Two more items:

3 comments:

Hokie Mark said...

Just read the Steve Ditmore piece, and I think he's wrong to assume the market value of a ratings point is the Big Ten Fox deal. In fact, Fox walking away from the Big XII CCG says to me that $20M for even a 6 rating is too much ($3M per point). At any rate, if the SEC really does get the kind of bump that he projects, it will be VERY disruptive to college sports as a whole. What are your thoughts?

Steve Dittmore said...

@Hokie Mark - Thanks for reading. My goal for the piece was to attempt to compare the B10 deal with other similarly-situated deals (exclusive broadcast windows on traditional OTA networks). There are other reasons why the B10 Fox deal makes sense (equity in BTN, for example).

You are right, $300 million would be extremely disruptive to college sports. If I am right about a return to OTA importance, then the SEC would have a real advantage over the B12, ACC, and Pac-12 which don't have exclusive OTA windows.

Matt said...

Fun read.
Yet, FOX Sports paid $240 million for 27 football games as 13 were on FS1 in 2017. So, wouldn't that price per rating/game be incorrect as it was based off of 14 games on Fox?