SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said Thursday that the weekly college football broadcast schedule will look very much the same as it does now after the move to ABC/ESPN next year.
There will be an SEC game at 2:30 p.m. Central/3:30 p.m. Eastern each Saturday on ABC, just as there has been on CBS since 1996. There will also be SEC games at 11 a.m. Central/noon Eastern on ABC and/or ESPN and the SEC Network as well as multiple primetime games on the various networks.
What will change beginning next year is that the mid-afternoon game will not necessarily be the No. 1 game of the week. That marquee matchup could shift to primetime, Sankey said.
“The broadcast windows become all day from an ABC standpoint,” Sankey said when speaking to reporters in Atlanta to preview Saturday’s SEC championship game between Alabama and Georgia. “Now, obviously there are other conferences with those affiliations. We have our ESPN or ESPN2, ESPNU and SEC Network commitments. But one of the opportunities that’s created with our new agreement is the ability to have more than only one game a day on broadcast TV.
“… We are accustomed through our CBS relationship that the best game of that particular day was often selected by CBS to go into that 3:30 window. … [Starting in 2024], we don’t have those same limits. So the best game of the day might be in primetime with great frequency. We will always have a 3:30 p.m. Eastern time SEC game broadcast on ABC, but a little bit more variability.”
Another thing the move to ESPN/ABC will allow the SEC to do is schedule kickoff times and broadcast assignments further out, Sankey said. In recent years, the league has announced kickoff times and television information for the first three weeks of the season and other select games during the summer, with the remainder announced on a week-to-week basis.
That will change with the SEC having only one broadcast partner to satisfy rather than two. Sankey said he is hopeful that up to half of the SEC’s kickoff times and television information will be announced by the time SEC Media Days takes place in July.
“Our staff is already working on what that broadcast schedule might look like,” Sankey said. “… The opportunity to know the noon Eastern time kickoffs throughout the season will allow our campuses and our fans to plan, rather than having those six-day and 12-day experiences around that early kickoff. We’ll have some flexibility between the midday and the primetime games and some scheduling, which is a bit of an hour differential rather than just waiting and wondering about the entire broadcast day.”
The SEC will announce its full schedule for 2024 in a primetime special on the SEC Network at 6 p.m. on Dec. 15. Some of those matchups were leaked by ESPN last week, including Alabama vs. Georgia on Sept. 28 and Texas vs. Texas A&M on Nov. 30.