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In the Big Ten’s second year as a coast-to-coast, 18-team conference, its primary TV partner is going back to the well of scheduling a team from the Eastern Time Zone to play a late-night matchup on the West Coast.
In Week 4, Fox will have the national broadcast of Michigan State–USC at 11 p.m. ET on Sept. 20.
It will mark the second such instance, following a Rutgers-USC matchup on Fox last October. However, that game was on a Friday night, directly following Game 1 of the Dodgers-Yankees World Series. With a strong lead-in (15.2 million viewers for the Fall Classic opener), Fox drew an audience of 2 million for its late-night college football broadcast.
But this year’s experiment comes on a Saturday night, following an Arizona State–Baylor Big 12 matchup at 7:30 p.m. ET on Fox. There won’t be another college football game on Fox following Game 1 of this year’s World Series on Friday, Oct. 24, but the network could opt to schedule one following Game 2 on Saturday, Oct. 25.
Michigan State head coach Jonathan Smith has not publicly reacted to the game time yet, as the scheduling announcement was released after his weekly press conference on Monday, but the football program’s official social media account did. “It’s gonna be a late one folks,” MSU football wrote on X.
The game will be Michigan State and USC’s first matchup since a 1990 bowl game, and the Spartans’ first visit to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum since 1978.
Fox Sports helped fund the Big Ten’s expansion, agreeing in 2023 to pay Oregon and Washington $35 million to $40 million annually for joining the conference. Since home games of those West Coast schools, along with USC and UCLA, have not yet been tapped for Fox’s Big Noon Saturday game window (which would be 9 a.m. PT), the network has been utilizing them in late-night slots to help fill out its college football programming.
The Late Show
The Big Ten is not the only conference scheduling late-night West Coast matchups.
On Saturday, Boston College visits Stanford in a game that will kick off at 10:30 p.m. ET and be broadcast on ACC Network. Minnesota, which is in the Central Time Zone, also plays at 10:30 p.m. ET at Cal.
