It didn’t take long for the audience metrics to justify Fox’s strategy of stocking its Friday night shelf with college football.
It took one night, in fact.
Kansas State’s lopsided victory over Arizona last week averaged 2.58 million viewers on Fox and easily surpassed the typical audience for the WWE’s Friday Night SmackDown, which previously occupied the network’s primetime window on Fridays.
That’s 330,000 more viewers than SmackDown averaged in its most-recent season, according to Sportico.
And there’s more football to come.
The Big 12 matchup from last week will give way to nine consecutive Friday night games featuring Big Ten conference games, followed by a return to the Big 12 for a Black Friday broadcast between longtime rivals Utah and UCF.
In all, the former Pac-12 teams now in the Big Ten and Big 12 will fill nine of the 22 slots on Fox College Football Friday broadcasts carved out of 11 weeks this season. Oregon, Washington and UCLA will make two appearances on Friday night. USC, Arizona and Utah will make one.
Fox and ESPN have broadcast college football on Friday in the past, with Pac-12 games taking a leading role. But Fox took the commitment to a new level this year after concluding that SmackDown wasn’t generating the desired audience or advertising dollars.
“In one move, they save money on WWE rights and simultaneously leverage their existing college football portfolio into a new prime time night that will be better received by advertisers (college sports vs. pro wrestling),” media industry analysts John Kosner and Ed Desser, who work together, explained in a joint email to the Hotline.
The Friday night broadcasts also provide Fox with an ideal lead-in to its premier college football matchup of the week the following morning with the Saturday ‘Big Noon’ game.
This week’s broadcast of No. 22 Illinois at No. 24 Nebraska on Friday, for example, will allow Fox to promote the Saturday matchup featuring Marshall and No. 3 Ohio State, one of the biggest ratings drivers in college football.
And as an added benefit, the Friday broadcasts are free.
“They would have produced these games anyway, and the (media) rights are already paid for,” Kosner and Desser wrote.
Shifting landscape
The push to broadcast college football on Friday night is part of a larger shift as live sports slowly takes over the weeknight television windows long reserved for scripted comedies and dramas.
For example, the NBA’s new media contract, which begins in 2025-26, will feature Tuesday night games on NBC.
“This is part of a broader move in sports broadcasting,” Kosner and Desser explained. “Fans are going to see sports on network prime time virtually every night of the week. ”
And don’t be surprised to see the networks eventually broadcast sports during weekday afternoons.
The eyeballs are available, especially with more people working remotely in the post-COVID era. And the success of the Olympics — not only in primetime but also during the work day — is evidence.
Kosner and Desser believe there will be “more and more live events in the afternoon.”
And ominously, they expect the …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
