Friday Night Lights
College football has been encroaching on the traditional football calendar
The traditional football weekend features high schoolers playing Friday, collegiates playing Saturday and pros playing Sunday. This season, it feels like the ACC (and for the first time, the NFL) are increasingly encroaching on the high schoolers’ turf, as the ACC has five conference games scheduled on Fridays – including FSU at Duke later tonight.
Since 2012, when the NFL regularly scheduled Thursday Night Football games, the football weekend has started early. Thursdays are still a prime slot of stand-alone college football — as VT’s “Orange Effect” game yesterday proved — but more games are shifting to Friday to get out of the NFL’s TNF shadow.
I was surprised to learn that this season’s ACC weekday schedule is roughly the same as years past, but other conferences have shifted their schedules more. This first chart is the share of conference games played by day of week for each conference’s 2024 schedule.
Next is the same breakdown using the 10-year totals from the 2014-2023 seasons.
One reading of the ACC’s weekday games are that networks don’t believe the games can compete for attention on a full Saturday slate.
MACtion is the canonical weekday football example, as ~40% of MAC conference games land on weekdays. Few people would elect to watch a Toledo-Northern Illinois game on Saturdays when other games are available, so the MAC wisely oriented around mid-week games, and now MACtion has a fervent following.
For the ACC, scurrying to weekday games could be interpreted in the same light, just another turn in the ACC’s death spiral. Take the Pac-12, the P5 (now P4) conference that had played the most weekday games before collapsing.
Instead, the weekday games are a smart choice by ESPN. For better or worse, the ACC is tied to the World Wide Leader, who otherwise would be running preview shows or a 30 For 30 – programming that would draw fewer viewers than a live game.
For conferences carried by the “Big Three” broadcasting networks1 (for example, the SEC on ABC), weekday games are infeasible because they would disrupt the usual network TV and sitcom schedules. As The Athletic reported this morning, the SEC on ABC has been averaging 4.4M to 5M viewers on their Saturday games (depending on the time slot), an impressive draw. However, those numbers are still comparable to much of ABC’s weekday programming, such as 9-1-1 (4.7M), Dancing with the Stars (5.0M) and the Golden Bachelor (4.7M)2.
This season is about an average ACC season in terms of weekday games. While the SEC plays almost exclusively on Saturdays, the Big Ten has followed the ACC’s lead and leaned heavily into Friday night games this season. The B10 has nearly tripled it’s ten-year average of weekday games, with ~14% compared to their ~5% long-run average, and this year is nearly 10x the number of weekday games from a decade ago.
The shift is quite purposeful, as Michael Mulvihill — the President of Insights and Analytics at Fox Sports3 — explained on The Season podcast with Peter Schrager4:
On opening up that Friday night and using it now as a college football showcase window, we want to try to create circumstances where football just takes over television five nights a week… We want our Friday night college game to regularly win Friday nights.
The Big 12 (BYU-Oklahoma State) and Big Ten (Oregon-Purdue) have major conference games tonight, too. Whatever the implications, you can tune in to ACC football tonight, the first game of a weekly slate that ramps up ACC play.
CBS, ABC and NBC
All the ABC numbers via tvseriesfinale.com
Fox is the B10’s broadcast partner
The September 18 episode, 40:30 timestamp on Spotify