For any Rutgers or Big Ten football fans wondering why the Scarlet Knights’ Week 9 matchup is kicking off at 11 p.m. ET Friday night, the answer is the same one that applies to many other questions in college sports right now: TV money.
The newly expanded, coast-to-coast Big Ten conference has given Fox Sports the opportunity to try something “a little unusual,” one top decision-maker admits.
In the spring, Fox decided to have Rutgers’ first visit to Big Ten newbie USC kick off right after Game 1 of the World Series, which begins at 8 p.m. ET, in a unique effort to try to maximize viewership from casual fans who might not otherwise be tuning in to the network’s new package of Friday night college football games.
“Obviously, that’s a very late start for the East Coast,” Fox Sports president of insights and analytics Mike Mulvihill said in an interview with Front Office Sports last month. But there should be well north of 10 million people watching Yankees-Dodgers who may stick around for the subsequent college football game. Rutgers and USC are located 20 miles and six miles from the Yankees’ and Dodgers’ home venues, respectively, so there should be no lack of crossover fans.
“There’s going to be some bleary-eyed fans in New Jersey, definitely recognized that,” Mulvihill said. “But it’s just a special opportunity to take advantage of the World Series in a way that we never really have been able to before.”
According to a source with knowledge of the situation, if the baseball broadcast is not over in time, the football game will start on FS1 and on two Fox-owned local stations. Fox’s primary channel would resume the football game in progress at the conclusion of the baseball broadcast.
Hot Start
Fox has aired five Friday night college football games so far this season (a sixth was bumped to FS1 for the MLB playoffs), averaging 2.74 million viewers. They all placed inside the 10 most-watched college football games of their respective weekends, and two even ended up as Fox’s top game audience of the weekend, led by 4.21 million viewers for Illinois-Nebraska on Sept. 20.
The post–World Series college football on Fox won’t become a trend this season, though. Next Friday night, Fox would air a theoretical Game 6 of the World Series, and the network does not have a college matchup on tap.
