We were the lucky ones, one afternoon during Week 1 of the 2007 college football season. As students at Michigan State, my friends and I had Big Ten Network in the dorm rooms. So, when we walked out of Spartan Stadium and heard Appalachian State was going down to the wire with Michigan, we ran to the nearest dorm and watched the stunning finish on BTN in the lobby. Many fans, even in Michigan, didn’t see it, because they didn’t have that brand-new BTN channel.
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These days, we could just pull the game up on our phones to watch, even in the stadium. In many ways, it has never been easier to be a sports fan and watch what you want — as long as you’re willing to pay for it. Sixteen years ago, there were games you simply could not watch, and you had to catch ESPN highlight shows to see them. Now it’s all available, from Group of 5 college football to Indian cricket to Australian Rules Football.
But it’s clear the viewing experience for major American sports has peaked from its golden era of a few years ago when almost everything was on cable, and Wednesday’s reveal of early-season college football broadcasts emphasized the direction we’re heading. Why? Because there’s always a little more money to be made off of fans. Now, you’ll pay for games you didn’t have to pay for before.
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TV networks reveal early season college football selections
Michigan State vs. Washington was an ABC prime-time game a year ago. This fall, it will be a streaming-only affair on Peacock as NBC’s new media rights deal with the Big Ten begins. It’s the highest-profile streaming-only game we’ve seen in this sport thus far. Washington is a College Football Playoff contender with a potential Heisman Trophy candidate in quarterback Michael Penix Jr. Michigan State won 11 games in 2021 and has one of the largest fan bases in the Big Ten.
What will the NBC TV channel show in its Big Ten prime-time window? Syracuse at Purdue.
This is the new world of sports viewership, where it has never been more expensive to watch your team. Your cable bill has gone up with more sports channels, and now you have to add streaming services, even for games that used to be on cable. It has crept into almost every sport, and the Big Ten is next.
You have to subscribe to four different services to watch the next five Yankees games.
SUN – Peacock
MON – off-day
TUES – YES
WEDS – Amazon Prime Video
THURS – YES
FRI – Apple TV+— River Ave. Blues (@RiverAveBlues) May 21, 2023
Michigan State will take the early brunt of the Big Ten’s NBC requirements. Not only will its marquee nonconference home game be relegated to streaming, but the Spartans will play at Ohio State at night on NBC in November and their final home game against Penn State has been moved to Black Friday at Ford Field in Detroit as the Big Ten tries to convince its schools to accept November night games.
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That urging is why the comments in ESPN’s story two weeks ago about the Big Ten television deal were so surprising. Football coaches and athletic directors are concerned about November night games, and basketball coaches are concerned about so many streaming-only games. The problem: None of this is new. It was all laid out in a press release last August, which The Athletic chronicled, too.
It’s not all at the feet of former commissioner Kevin Warren. The schools agreed to this. You can’t sign and tout a massive television deal and then act surprised that someone has to fill those NBC night games in November or play on Peacock. If it wasn’t NBC, it probably would have been Amazon. If you’re an upset coach, take it up with the school administrators.
The additions of USC and UCLA in 2024 will help fill night games, but those windows were never going to be stocked only with low-profile matchups. NBC is paying a reported $350 million per year for good games. The same goes for CBS. As Don Draper famously put it in “Mad Men”: “I give you money, you give me ideas. … That’s what the money is for.” In this case, “ideas” are games that draw bigger audiences than most other conferences.
This two-pronged move into streaming has taken place across all kinds of sports in recent years. Major League Baseball plays streaming-only games on Apple TV+, Amazon and Peacock. NBC has moved more English Premier League games to Peacock-only, especially after shuttering the NBC Sports Network channel. MLS plays the majority of its schedule on Apple TV+, and its cost is separate from your normal Apple TV+ fee.
It’s also not new to the highest levels of college sports. Oklahoma has played a streaming-only or pay-per-view football game for years. The Sooners’ matchup with potential AAC-favorite SMU this season will be on ESPN+. The SEC has put bottom-level nonconference football games on ESPN+ (with SEC Network+ digital availability through cable). A massive Kansas–Kansas State basketball game in January aired only on ESPN+, and we haven’t talked enough about how much streaming there is in that new Big 12 deal. Across the sport, there will be more big college football games kept exclusive to streaming in the future.
Percentage of CFB games on streaming/broadcast/cable through Week 3 in 2023:
ACC: 11%/22%/66%
B1G: 8%/32%/60%
Big 12: 39%/22%/39%
Pac-12: 3%/23%/74%
SEC: 25%/15%/60%
— Bryan Fischer (@BryanDFischer) May 31, 2023
The NFL put Thursday Night Football on Amazon but still offered a local TV broadcast for the two cities involved. The league also announced recently that Peacock will get a wild-card playoff game on Jan. 13, 2024. That, too, will have a local NBC broadcast for the two cities. These college football games don’t have that option.
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This is the future, and the future costs more.
I have Peacock. I like it. I regularly watch English soccer and WWE shows for $5 a month on the ad tier. My wife watches “Parks and Recreation”. They’ve worked out the live sports kinks, unlike some other streaming services. If it wasn’t football, Big Ten fans were going to have to sign up for Peacock anyway, with dozens of conference basketball games on the service as part of the deal.
But there’s no doubt moving a marquee football game like MSU-Washington (which got 2.79 million viewers last year on ABC) to a streaming service will draw less attention on a busy college football Saturday. It’s not standalone like those NFL games. You won’t scroll and come across it. Exiting out of one service and jumping into another is much more cumbersome than changing channels.
As cable subscribers continue to decline, sports are the only thing keeping the entire operation afloat. In turn, rights fees for the Big Ten and SEC continue to skyrocket. But there’s been no proof yet that streaming will save television. Most of these services, from Disney+ to Paramount+ to Peacock, are losing billions of dollars, and Netflix (which is profitable) doesn’t want to jump into live sports yet. That’s why there have been so many cuts and layoffs in that world. They’ve latched themselves to this uncertain future and sped up the decline of money-making linear TV because of it. (Reports that ESPN is considering making its entire offering available via streaming in a few years could speed up that decline … or send people back to the bundle.)
Fox is the one major broadcaster that hasn’t jumped into streaming. Two weeks ago, in response to a comment about the New York Yankees playing on several different channels and services in a single week, Fox Sports executive vice president of strategy and analytics Michael Mulvihill tweeted, “The harder we make it to find sports, the more the next generation of potential fans will punish us.”
The Big Ten will expand its reach like never before by playing so many games on network television, and it is the richest conference in the country. As a whole, TV ratings and attendance are up in all kinds of sports. Business is still, mostly, booming. The Pac-12 would love to have the Big Ten’s problems if it came with billions of dollars.
But each extra ask of fans adds up over time. Whether it’s holding game time announcements until the last minute, longer TV timeouts or playing on streaming services, fans are being asked to shoulder more and more burden in the name of television dollars.
It’s easier to watch games now than it was a generation ago. The next generation might not feel the same.
(Photo: Joe Nicholson / USA Today)
