Your 2024 college football sports media primer

It’s Christmas Eve for college football fans as the 2024 season officially gets underway tomorrow with Week 0, which is a totally ridiculous concept but perfect for the sport that we all love.

While Week 0 is a light appetizer featuring just four games, it will mark the debut of College GameDay as ESPN goes all-out for the season opening contest in Dublin, Ireland between Florida State and Georgia Tech. It’s a long road from August 24th in Dublin to January 20th, 2025 for the National Championship Game in Atlanta and we’re here to prepare you for every step of the journey.

Here now is your 2024 College Football Sports Media Primer.

First Game: Georgia Tech @ #10 Florida State, August 24th 12 PM ET, ESPN, Dublin
Last Game: CFP National Championship Game, January 20th 2025, ESPN, Atlanta

What’s new for the 2024 college football season

1) The SEC on ESPN

ESPN has been a business parter of the SEC for a long, long time. That relationship deepened with the creation of the SEC Network back in 2014. But throughout the last decade, CBS has held onto what usually was the biggest game of the week in the most decorated conference in modern college football. That changes this year. All the way back in 2020, the SEC and ESPN signed a 10 year deal that saw Bristol take hold of all football and men’s basketball games beginning in 2024. So instead of the SEC on CBS at their traditional 3:30 PM ET window, that honor goes to ESPN and ABC. And in announcing their broadcast lineup for the season, ESPN said it’ll use a rotation of their top announcing teams for the window depending on their full slate that week.

2) The Big Ten on CBS

While CBS televised some Big Ten games last year, as the network says goodbye to the SEC they will fully welcome the other member of the Power 2 this year. The Big Ten is going the opposite direction of the SEC in terms of television strategies. While the ESPN and SEC are married at the hip, the Big Ten is taking an NFL-style approach by splitting up their rights fees. The conference will see three national windows throughout the day on three different networks that follow the professional blueprint. Big Noon Saturday will kick it off at 12 PM ET on Fox. CBS keeps their traditional timeslot at 3:30 PM ET. And NBC returns with the Big Ten in primetime (at least in most weeks where Notre Dame won’t take that slot).

The network splitting of games and the Big Ten draft is one of the more interesting inside baseball events in sports media as argubaly the marquee game of the season, Ohio State at Oregon, was the subject of a network trade . At least Oswald the Lucky Rabbit wasn’t involved this time.

3) Friday Night Football on Fox

Another new element of the Big Ten media contract that is transformative is Fox Sports adding games on Friday nights. Friday night college football has been resisted for ages because of its impact on the high school game, especially in the midwest. But what television wants, television gets. After choosing not to renew Friday Night Smackdown and stay in business with WWE, Fox is moving their Friday night strategy to live sports . In the fall, that means plenty of Big Ten games that provide yet another national window for the conference.

4) Conference Realignment

The tectonic shifts in the sport in conference realignment are directly tied into the media contracts signed by each conference. The Pac-12 died a tragic death because it couldn’t land a new rights deal and teams fled to the Big Ten, Big XII, and ACC. The 2024 season will be the biggest overhaul to the college football landscape the sport has ever seen. Just in case you’ve been under a rock for much of the last several years, here are some of the totally insane new conference affiliations that go into effect this year.

ACC: Cal, Stanford, SMU
Big Ten: USC, UCLA, Washington, Oregon
Big XII: Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, Utah
Pac-2: Oregon State, Washington State
SEC: Texas, Oklahoma

While conference realignment will lead to some fantasy matchups that should really only be possible in the CFB ’25 video game, it has come at a dramatic cost to the fabric of the sport.

In new media deals for conferences, the surviving members of the Pac-12 have a deal in place with The CW for broadcasts this year while the Mountain West will see games on truTV .

As far as what we’re losing, with Texas joining the SEC, ESPN shuttered the Longhorn Network. Also, the Pac-12 Network signed off the air because, well, there isn’t a Pac-12 conference anymore.

5) Expanded College Football Playoff

The other massive change this year in the sport is the new 12-team playoff that will replace the four team version that began a decade ago. It’s a welcome change for the most exclusive postseason in sports as it gives more teams an opportunity at a championship, but time will tell if it has a negative effect on what was the most high-stakes, significant regular season in sports.

As far as the television rights go, ESPN was able to hold off competition from the other major networks to secure the rights to all playoff games in the 12-team version. However, ESPN has sub-licensed two games to WBD that will air on TNT after the company made a massive offer to have a stake in the postseason. The two TNT games this year will be first round games that air at 1 PM ET and 4 PM ET on January 21st and will go head-to-head with the NFL after a bit of a standoff over their competing late December schedules.

The expanded playoff also means that the tournament begins earlier and ends later than ever before. First Round games take place on January 20-21. The quarterfinals will take up the traditional New Year’s Day bowl games and one New Year’s Eve slot at the Fiesta Bowl at 7:30 PM ET, giving enough time for folks to join Ryan Seacrest at midnight. Semifinal games will take place on January 9-10 at the Cotton Bowl and Orange Bowl. Finally the National Championship Game happens all the way on January 20 – which triples up as Inauguration Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

6) Old Faces in New Places

Nick Saban is the biggest new addition to the college football broadcast lineup as he joins College GameDay coming off one of the most successful coaching stints in the history of American sports at Alabama. Saban has excelled in brief cameos so far at ESPN and it’ll be fascinating to see how he does in a full-time media role. Louis Riddick will take up a CFB game analyst role at ESPN after the surprising firing of Robert Griffin III weeks before the start of the season due to budgetary concerns in Bristol.

Colt McCoy was recently announced as a new addition covering the Big Ten on NBC. Dan Hicks reprises his role as the voice of Notre Dame football after Jac Collinsworth proved he was not quite ready for the role.

Biggest Media Questions for the College Football Season

1) Will anyone care about Colorado?

Last season Deion Sanders and the Colorado Buffaloes became an overnight sensation. After a surprising opening victory at National Championship runner-up TCU, Primetime led the Buffs to a national television shellacking of Nebraska. Then came arguably the game of the season in an epic double overtime victory over in-state rival Colorado State.

At the time, Colorado’s rise was the college football version of Linsanity. ESPN and FS1 were anchored in Boulder on a weekly basis. Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter were in the Heisman hunt. Celebrities were showing up on the sidelines. It wasn’t just a college football story, it was a cultural phenomenon.

Of course, it all fell apart as Colorado lost eight of their next nine games and finished 4-8.

It seems impossible to say 11 months ago, but Colorado comes into the 2024 season a bit under the radar. In fact, the only headlines are coming from Deion Sanders sniping back and forth with the local media and a potential Saudi NIL investment. Expectations are much more realistic this season and the sports media may be a little more cautious in anointing the Buffs this time around if they get off to another hot start.

2) Will the expanded playoff impact regular season ratings?

As noted above, the new 12-team playoff will be a huge boost to the college football postseason as those games should draw massive numbers across the board. Instead of bowl games that mattered a fraction as much as they used to, the major New Year’s Day bowl games will take centerstage with playoff implications. And then there will be a round of semifinals and a final on top of it.

But college football has been built for generations on having the one regular season that truly mattered in sports. If Ohio State can lose to Michigan and still be guaranteed a playoff spot, will it still have the same appeal? What about a Georgia-Alabama game in the middle of the fall that is merely for seeding purposes?

It may stoke some concern for college football diehards, but let’s be honest. An expanded playoff hasn’t hurt the NFL regular season ratings at all. And college football is the country’s second most popular sport after the NFL. If anything, more teams being involved in playoff contention might make even more games have title implications which could boost ratings instead of blunting them.

3) What will be the most watched game window?

The SEC on CBS had held bragging rights forever as the most-watched game window of the season. However, Big Noon Saturday took the crown last year leaning on Big Ten powerhouses and the early season Colorado wave. Much of the schedule this season is yet to be determined, but Big Noon Saturday would have to be the favorite once again. Fox will air Michigan-Ohio State once again and features Michigan-Texas and Alabama-Wisconsin in September. They clearly have the best Big Ten package as the conference’s primary partner (and owner of BTN) and after years of trying, have made the 12 PM ET timeslot their own. Of course, four west coast teams in the Big Ten will limit those options, but their trips east will make for compelling viewing.

The main competition won’t come from CBS, but the SEC on ABC 3:30 PM ET window. The Red River Rivalry (now an SEC game) will take up that timeslot moving back from its traditional start time. And it’ll have the Florida-Georgia rivalry game. However, the Georgia-Alabama showdown is already locked into primetime. Unlike Fox who is all in at Noon, ESPN will have to balance their afternoon and primetime windows and all of their other rights deals to make the best schedule. Over the course of the season, it’ll be fascinating to see how that scheduling breaks down.

4 ) Will Big Noon Kickoff close the gap on College GameDay?

Another area where Fox Sports has made inroads is in the pregame department. College GameDay has been a staple for decades and, along with Inside the NBA, the gold standard in studio shows for all of sports media. They invented the road show and are still going strong. With the additions of Pat McAfee and Nick Saban in back-to-back years, ESPN is still throwing everything they can at GameDay to make it a must-watch event.

However, Fox Sports is gaining ground in the space. Like their efforts with Big Noon Saturday, years of trying to establish themselves as a major college football player seem to have finally resonated. Big Noon Kickoff is closer to College GameDay in the ratings than ever before .

Fox’s pregame has a natural flow leading into Big Noon Saturday which creates a great synergy because it can draw in viewers for the game ahead. College GameDay doesn’t always have that as they may be at sites for late afternoon or primetime games and try to follow the biggest storylines in the sport. Sometimes it’s an ESPN game, sometimes it’s not. In fact, the GameDay site selection process is much more closely watched than Big Noon Kickoff because of how ESPN’s coverage priorities may influence their picks.

Will Saban give GameDay a boost? Will McAfee’s polarizing effect on GameDay continue? And can Fox close the gap even more this season? It’ll be a race worth watching.

5) Will tribalism and conspiracies be at an all-time high?

Because of the subjective nature of college football, it has always been an easy target for rumor, innuendo, and conspiracy theories. Unlike professional sports where the standings are all that matters, college football has been built on the opinions of voters and power brokers. And the networks that pay billions of dollars have a very clear role in setting the narratives that can take hold. With these billions invested, it’s not exactly an Ancient Aliens level of dot connecting to contend that the financial investment could theoretically play a role in how the sport is covered.

Now that the ESPN is fully committed to the SEC and the Big Ten has their triumvirate of Fox, CBS, and NBC the sport is more ripe than ever before to see these questions come to light even more. How will ESPN’s coverage of the SEC be different this year versus previous years? Will Fox try to pump up the new and improved Big Ten with their additions and Michigan’s national championship? Will the sport see a regional and cultural divide grow where SEC fans are watching GameDay and Big Ten fans are watching Big Noon Kickoff and there are dueling sets of competing narratives?

And what about the schools that aren’t involved in the Power 2 that feel like they have no advocates whatsoever? The ACC must feel like the little brother at ESPN as the CFP selection process was marred last year by all sorts of conspiracy theories and righteous anger from Florida State fans who felt aggrieved and robbed of a spot after their undefeated team got left out of the four team playoff. Then there was the whole episode earlier in the year where Washington State felt wronged by College GameDay that is still leading to some open wounds .

Hopefully the 12-team playoff turns the heat down a bit on the rhetoric and ulterior motives that the sport has opened itself up to for far too long because more teams feel like they have a chance on the national stage and don’t have to depend on the things Kirk Herbstreit says about them on television . Each network should have some extra awareness when it comes to the narratives they create and try to play it as down the middle as they can. Because if the tribalism keeps rising after last year’s drama, college football fandom may become as exhausting to follow as political cable news… if we aren’t there already.

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