Fox Deportes will televise 17 college football games this season, the biggest college football schedule the network has ever carried. The schedule includes the Pac-12 and Big Ten Football Championship games. Fox Deportes has not carried any college football games since ‘96. The schedule starts Saturday with Hawaii visiting top-ranked USC. Other early-season match-ups will include Miami-Kansas State Sept. 8 and USC-Stanford Sept. 15. Pablo Alsina and Francisco Rivera will call the action (John Ourand, THE DAILY).
SAME GAL, DIFFERENT NET: In L.A., Lance Pugmire noted Erin Andrews will host the new "Fox College Saturday" pregame show that will debut at 7:00pm ET Saturday, with the network televising the Hawaii-USC game. Andrews said of the show, "We are excited. I hadn't dealt with Joey [Harrington] or Eddie [George] since our audition. We wanted to decide if there was chemistry, and there is. ... You can just tell there's something there, because the three of us live and breathe college football” (LATIMES.com, 8/28).
NEW KID ON THE BLOCK: The Univ. of Missouri's season-opening football game Sept. 1 against Southeastern Louisiana Univ. “will be broadcast on pay-per-view for $39.99.” In K.C., Terez Paylor noted the broadcast, which “will be in high-definition, will be made available in the state of Missouri and spillover markets.” SEC TV contracts “dictate that when none of the league’s television partners option to air a SEC school’s game, the school is allowed to air the game on pay-per-view.” The telecast, which will be “produced by Fox Sports, will feature Dave Armstrong doing play-by-play and former Missouri quarterback Corby Jones as his color analyst” (K.C. STAR, 8/25).
GOING VIRAL: In K.C., Kellis Robinett noted Kansas State Univ. athletic officials “came up with the idea” to turn football coach Bill Snyder’s “16 goals for success into a series of Internet videos.” The 16 videos “have been viewed more than 220,000 times,” showing “how much impact a popular Internet video can make in today’s age of social media.” Fans are “sharing links to the Wildcats’ athletic web site on Twitter, football ticket sales are at an all-time high and K-State reached such a large audience that it didn’t have to spend much money on TV commercials.” K-State Powercat Vision Dir Brian Smoller said, “The 16 videos are so popular that we’ve had people ask us to put them on a DVD. That’s not something we anticipated for a series of short promotional football videos” (K.C. STAR, 8/25).
