In a seismic shift that could forever change the face of sports television broadcasting, the Bowl Championship Series officially signed with ESPN on Tuesday.
Beginning in 2011, ESPN will televise the BCS National Championship Game, as well as the Fiesta Bowl, Orange Bowl and Sugar Bowl. This marks the first time in history the national championship game of college football has aired on cable.
The National Championship Game will air on ESPN through 2013, while the other three bowls will air on the network through 2014. The Rose Bowl will remain on ABC, in a preexisting deal that expires in 2014. There had been speculation the Rose Bowl would move from ABC to ESPN as well.
In addition to the BCS bowl games, ESPN will unveil the BCS standings on an as-yet-unnamed weekly Sunday show.
This will mark the first time since the mid-1990s that the championship of a major U.S. sporting event airs on cable. From 1981 to 1994, the much lower profile Stanley Cup Finals aired on a variety of cable networks.
The National Championship Game is one of the highest rated sporting events to ever make the move from broadcast to cable. In the past three years, the game has drawn ratings of 21.7, 17.4 and 14.4. Those numbers will almost certainly drop with a move to ESPN; the highest U.S. rating for a sporting event on cable is an 11.3 for a Monday Night Football game earlier this year.
Ratings will additionally suffer for the other three BCS bowls to air on ESPN, none of which managed to draw even an 8.0 rating on FOX last January.
This is by far the biggest move in the continuing trend of major sporting events to cable television. While the NBA’s 2002 television deal sparked the trend by shifting most games to cable, the NBA Finals remain on broadcast for at least the next eight years. The same is true for Major League Baseball, which shifted the entire Division Series and an LCS to TBS, but kept the World Series on FOX. Though ESPN grabbed the marquee Monday Night Football franchise, the NFL still keeps the lion’s share of its games on broadcast, including all playoff games. Even the much maligned National Hockey League keeps the majority of its championship series on broadcast.
The move to cable of college football’s national championship game, the strongest ratings performer in sports (excluding the NFL), sets a precedent that will likely result in the move of other championship events to cable.
