Fox Sports and defending College Football Playoff champion Ohio State had an agreement to move the Buckeyes’ season-opening game against Texas to Sunday in prime time, but Longhorns’ brass vetoed the move, keeping the game at noon on the season’s first Saturday.
“There was a deal in place between Fox and Ohio State to move the game to Sunday night,” Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports’ president of insights and analytics, told The Athletic. “We felt like Week 1 prior to NFL kickoff gave us an opportunity to look at sort of an alternate scenario, and then Texas exercised their contractual right to keep the game on Saturday, which is completely their right. I can understand why they would take that position, but we did work with the school to try to come up with a different scenario and get the game to Sunday.”
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The attempted change sought to assuage Ohio State fans’ ire about kickoff times after the Buckeyes finished the 2024 regular season with six consecutive noon starts last year, including five as part of Fox’s branded Big Noon Saturday broadcast. Had Texas approved of the move, it would have kept the Big Ten’s ratings Goliath on Fox.
The rematch between CFP semifinalists will generate huge ratings no matter when it is televised. Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte told reporters at SEC meetings this week he was the one who shot down the opportunity.
“Why would I want to move the game to Sunday night and have a short week?” said Del Conte, which was reported by ESPN. “I’ve got to go to church.”
Texas plays San Jose State back home in Austin in Week 2, kicking off at noon ET (11 a.m. local time), while Ohio State hosts FCS program Grambling later that afternoon at 3:30 p.m. ET.
Fox shares Big Ten media rights with CBS and NBC but has the first three selections in the league’s annual draft. Ohio State appeared in eight of the 21 highest-rated games last season en route to a national championship and is the Big Ten’s flagship program annually for viewership. It makes the Buckeyes a target for the top selection each week, whether that’s on Fox, CBS or NBC.
“I definitely recognize and appreciate that it was frustrating for their fans last year to finish the season with six straight games at the same kickoff time,” Mulvihill said. “It’s something that’s just a byproduct of doing these game allocations via a draft. It’s not something that you would draw up if you had full control of the schedule and you just did it on a whiteboard. But when you’ve got three entities cycling through draft picks, there are things that can happen that maybe aren’t the way that you would draw it up. They’re not ideal. So I definitely understand the frustration that they had at the end of last season.”
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Fox owns 61 percent of Big Ten Network, a joint venture the organizations founded in 2007. The Big Ten’s rights fees with its media partners approach $1 billion per year, with Fox paying the largest percentage.
“The model we’ve got in place allows the conference to have the highest media rights fees in the country, and a lot of that media rights revenue is being passed on to player talent and coaching talent,” Mulvihill said. “I think there’s a direct link between the media rights deals that the Big Ten has struck and the fact that the conference has won the last two national championships.”
(Photo: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
