It probably won’t win any Emmy awards, but Fox College Sports will be showing tape-delayed video feeds of Big 12 college football games taken from video used by officials to review instant replays.
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| Audio for the tape-delayed games will come from the home team's radio broadcasts. |
The conference mandated that there be television production of every football game this season after it adopted video replays for officials to check disputed calls. Previously, some games weren’t televised at all.
So Fox College Sports, made up of three channels that draw almost all of their programming from Fox Sports Net regional affiliates, will now take the video and edit it to include a mix of camera angles and fit it exactly into a three-hour format. The result is FCS’s first regularly scheduled original programming, branded “FCS Extra Credit” and airing at 7 p.m. ET Tuesdays and some Wednesdays on FCS Central.
Audio from the home team’s radio broadcast will provide the play-by-play. There will be no graphics on the telecasts other than a static FCS logo.
It’s a low-budget outgrowth of the high-tech college sports landscape where video replays and digital cable channels are proliferating. Because the conference covers the cost of the initial production, the expense for FCS is minimal.
At least 14 games will be shown under “FCS Extra Credit” this season. On Tuesday, FCS will show the Colorado at Oklahoma State game from Saturday. On Wednesday, it will show a battle of unbeatens, Kansas at Texas Tech. These are arguably much higher-profile games than some shown live on rival college sports network CSTV and of similar caliber to those on ESPNU, which had an exclusive telecast of South Florida’s upset of No. 9 Louisville on Sept. 17. But Fox is not looking to sink cash into original productions for its FCS channel, as CSTV and ESPNU are doing each week.
The FCS channels reach about 3.1 million homes — less than half those of the other college sports channels and only about 3.4 percent of all satellite and cable homes nationwide. FCS general manager David Rone said the network is trying to be opportunistic in a way that makes sense for a programmer of that size.
“It’s strictly a matter of economics,” Rone said on why Fox packages the games in this way rather than doing a full live production. “Today, based on our subscriber base, I can’t effectively go out and produce a college football game to the tune of $60,000 to $70,000 and sell enough advertising in order to pay production and end up with a margin.”
It comes down to getting games on television that would not be shown otherwise.
