ESPN CFB YouTube highlights approach questioned

For decades, part of the narrative of the college football discussion has been about which networks have rights deals with which conferences. That’s led to questions for ESPN, Fox, CBS, NBC, and more, especially when it comes to content outside of live game rights.

The latest frontier is YouTube. That’s led to Reddit claims that ESPN is ignoring highlights from games where teams from high-powered conferences which they have the rights to come up short against less-regarded opponents.

A claim like that deserves some investigation. First, yes, it is true that the ESPN College Football YouTube account (presumably what was referenced here, albeit with no link in the originating Reddit post ) put out a lot of “full game highlights” videos for Week 3 of the college football season (25, by our count), but did not include Toledo’s upset road win over Mississippi State.

Granted, the 25 games there are less than half of the 54 games listed in our announcing schedule this week. But the Rockets’ 41-17 win here (broadcast on ESPNU) was certainly more notable for many from a neutral perspective than many of the games that did receive “full game highlights.” Those include No. 7 Tennessee’s 71-0 win over Kent State and No. 23 Nebraska’s 34-3 victory over Northern Iowa.

Thus, if decisions were being made strictly on a basis of editorial merit without regard to conference, it seems likely Toledo-Mississippi State might have deserved highlight treatment over those. (It’s worth noting that while the Rockets-Bulldogs game did not hit that YouTube channel, it did get some highlights on the ESPN.com game page ; however, the most in-depth full-game treatment there only ran one minute and three seconds.)

And it’s not just about the Bulldogs. Neither Vanderbilt’s 36-32 loss to Georgia State nor Arkansas’ rough 37-27 win over UAB wound up on that channel either. So, on this particular weekend, that channel avoided some of the worst SEC performances.

AA reached out to ESPN for comment on this. We did not get an on-the-record statement, but we did get information on how their staff cuts highlights (which they say is for 22 different YouTube channels). They indicated that their highlights are specifically focused on the top games of the weekend, and the amount of highlights they can show is determined by rights.

Thus, while the network has highlights from Fox games like the Nebraska-Northern Iowa one mentioned above or Oregon-Oregon State , those tend to be shorter packages than the games aired on their networks. And the length of those highlights packages varies significantly beyond that. Some are only a couple of minutes (even for games where they have rights), while some Fox-originating games have more than four minutes of highlights, and some games have more than eight minutes of highlights.

So, what’s deserving of a “full highlights” placement on the ESPN YouTube channel? Again, we didn’t get an on-the-record comment, but the information we did receive is that there is precedence for cutting highlights of “high-performing teams and brands” to boost both engagement on that specific channel and within the overall context of Google’s (YouTube’s parent company) search.

Many media outlets are currently making coverage moves based on what they believe will draw the most clicks rather than deciding what’s worthy of coverage from a purely editorial sense, so ESPN is far from alone with the “high-performing teams and brands” argument. And editorial judgement is subjective, too, and different people may have differing levels of interest in any particular result. But it is interesting to hear arguments of “top games” advanced when the data points in question are things like Tennessee 71 – Kent State 0 (on SEC Network), and Nebraska 34 – Northern Iowa 3 (on Fox) versus Toledo 41 – Mississippi State 17 (on ESPNU).

This all needs to be taken into consideration in the wider conversation about ESPN and SEC bias (which, yes, has become even more of a conversation now that they have the conference’s full rights rather than sharing them with CBS). As always, it should be noted that much of that conversation has not come with adequate context around similar Big Ten bias and influence (which comes with some very stark data points ) at Fox.

Just saying “ESPN loves the SEC” is not the full story. And the network has posted full highlights of quite a few SEC teams ‘ out-of-conference losses to this specific channel. (However, unlike the Toledo loss here or the Reddit poster’s reference to New Mexico State-Auburn last year, all of those losses were against Power Four teams.)

With all that said, there remains a lot of significant material to discuss here. Yes, Toledo-Mississippi State wasn’t on most advanced lists predicting this weekend’s top games. And it was not close throughout (as that lopsided score indicates), and it wasn’t one of the biggest discussion points coming out of the weekend (beyond just how hot the seat is for Bulldogs’ head coach Jeff Lebby, now 1-2 in his first season). But that was a significant result, especially for the Mid-American Conference and the Rockets, and it was much more significant than some of the games ESPN did cut highlights for.

Of course, ESPN absolutely can prioritize games how they want. School brands and particular engagement on Google and YouTube can impact those decisions. Some schools have such significant fanbases that even almost irrelevant walkovers involving them may perform better than more legitimately interesting games involving other schools.

Ultimately, ESPN has no obligation to put any highlights on YouTube. They certainly can do that, and they can get the engagement and ad revenue from doing that, but they don’t have to. And ESPN deciding not to assign someone to cut highlights for this specific game doesn’t erase the game from the popular memory or the public record.

And even if a move to avoid cutting these specific highlights was intended as SEC propaganda (something there’s no reporting suggesting right now), it wouldn’t be very effective. It’s hard to imagine that ESPN’s YouTube channel not carrying highlights from one particular SEC school’s loss means much for overall conference strength. And it’s not the biggest deal that they didn’t cut these particular highlights. But, notably, the ESPN responses here did not contain anything to particularly justify assigning people to cut full highlights for YouTube for the likes of Tennessee’s 71-0 win over Kent State and Nebraska’s 34-3 win over Northern Iowa rather than Toledo’s 41-17 win over Mississippi State.

Is that decision just about school brands? Is it really that more people will watch highlights of those big schools in inconsequential games than of a Group of Five school taking down a less-prominent Power Four one? That’s possible. But the priorities here are not tightly defined (at least, not in how they were explained to AA), leaving a lot of room for discussions of what does and doesn’t count as a “top game” or a “high-performing team and brand.”

That lack of tight definition is going to lead to questions along the lines of what showed up on Reddit here. If there was a strict “We will cut highlights for anything that meets this criteria,” that would be an easy rebuttal to conspiracy theories. But there doesn’t seem to be one. And that will of course lead to further questioning of if and how the network’s business relationships impact its editorial decisions .

[ r/CFB ]

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