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Long road to big games on first weekend

Alabama-FSU matchup was a seven-year process

This weekend’s college football matchup between No. 1 Alabama and No. 3 Florida State is a scheduling marvel — especially when you consider that it’s been seven years in the making.

In 2010, Florida State was coming off a relatively pedestrian 8-4 season; Alabama had just finished fourth in the SEC West. That’s when ESPN’s master scheduler, Dave Brown, and Gary Stokan, Chick-fil-A Kickoff president and CEO, approached Florida State Athletic Director Randy Spetman and Alabama AD Mal Moore about a season-opening matchup nearly seven years later.

Alabama and Florida State ultimately signed a contract in 2013 that will enable ABC to walk away with a game that is certain to be Saturday’s night’s highest-rated TV program.

Perhaps not surprisingly after seven years, among the people who first dreamed up the game in 2010, only Stokan will be involved with it. Spetman and the late Moore stepped down a few years later. Brown left ESPN in 2015 to run his own scheduling service called Gridiron.

First Look podcast, will college football discussion beginning at the 7:20 mark:

Fox doesn’t make matchups, but waits until games are set and then maneuvers them into windows.
That kind of turnover underscores the difficulty of setting up early-season, neutral-site games in NFL stadiums.

ABC hit the jackpot with the Alabama-Florida State matchup. But matchups don’t always pan out. The process of scheduling marquee early-season games seven years out is filled with pitfalls, broken promises and messy Excel spreadsheets, but the payoff can be a lineup of strong opening-weekend games.

This week’s slate includes the Texas A&M-UCLA shootout, which Fox moved from Saturday to Sunday, and Tulsa-Oklahoma State, which is now a Thursday night tilt on ESPN. Don’t forget FS1’s Washington-Rutgers on Friday and ESPN’s Tennessee-Georgia Tech on Monday.

With games shifting all over the calendar, college football’s opening weekend has grown to be a full five days.

“We’ve gone through an explosion of big opening games,” said Nick Dawson, ESPN’s vice president of programming and acquisitions, including college football. “Not only did we have an interest in starting the season in a big way, but schools also saw a business opportunity.”

The business opportunity is obvious. These games deliver big paydays — $4 million to $6 million per school. That’s more than most schools typically make for home nonconference games.

It should come as no surprise that the main strategy to scheduling these early-season games is to focus on the biggest brands. Alabama, for example, is always in demand. The Tide is slated to play in a high-dollar, neutral-site game in 2018 and 2019.

The early-season football matchups present a case where the rich get richer. Two of college football’s elite programs — Florida and Michigan — will cash checks of close to $6 million each to appear in the Cowboys Classic Saturday afternoon on ABC.

Opening weekend’s
top games


THURSDAY
• Ohio State at Indiana, ESPN

FRIDAY
• Washington at Rutgers, FS1

SATURDAY
• Maryland at Texas, FS1
• N.C. State vs. South Carolina, ESPN
• Florida vs. Michigan, ABC
• Temple at Notre Dame, NBC
• Louisville vs. Purdue, Fox
• Florida State vs. Alabama, ABC
• BYU vs. LSU, ESPN

SUNDAY
• West Virginia vs. Virginia Tech, ABC
• Texas A&M at UCLA, Fox

MONDAY
• Tennessee vs. Georgia Tech, ESPN

Some coaches like these games as a high-profile way to recruit.

But lots of coaches hate these games.

Stokan said he wasn’t sure he could convince Alabama and Florida State to square off because of a longtime friendship between the two coaches, Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher. Many coaches try not to play games against protégés.

“There was a lot of back and forth with both coaches,” Stokan said. “You never know who will say yes to what, especially when it’s friend versus friend.”

Most of the time, it’s the TV networks that have to convince the coaches and ADs.

Once the schools agree to the games, it’s up to the networks to figure out when to play them. These decisions almost solely are based on television ratings.

Take Saturday, for example. ABC had an afternoon and an evening window and two monster matchups, Alabama-Florida State and Florida-Michigan. ESPN decided the Tide and the ’Noles would bring a bigger audience, so that game ended up in prime time. Florida-Michigan will play in the afternoon.

“The brand strength for all four programs is really strong, but the expectations were a little higher for Alabama-FSU,” Dawson said.

By all accounts, ESPN does much more matchmaking than Fox.

Fox’s Derek Crocker, director of college sports, began working on this season’s scheduling in January, a few weeks after the national championship game. Unlike ESPN, Fox doesn’t make the matchups. Rather, it waits until the games are set and then maneuvers them into the best windows.

Crocker targets big college football brands, of course. But he also looks for good storylines. This season, he focused on first-year coaches. Texas’ Tom Herman, Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley and Purdue’s Jeff Brohm, among others, will make their coaching debuts on Fox channels.

“We’re all storytellers at heart, so we’re always looking for storylines,” Crocker said. “We consult with our analysts to figure out where the best storylines are and then schedule so we can get the most eyeballs.”

FSU Coach Jimbo Fisher.
Alabama Coach Nick Saban.
When Fox picked up the Texas A&M-UCLA game, the network reached out to the Bruins about moving the game from Saturday to Sunday. Ratings are typically better on that Sunday with no NFL competition, which means more national eyeballs for the two teams.

“We pitched UCLA on putting this game on the biggest platform we have, which is Fox broadcast, and we’re going to put it in prime time,” Crocker said.

Playing a Sunday game puts teams at a disadvantage for the following week because they lose a day of preparation, but ultimately the exposure of playing on Fox on a Sunday with just one other college game was worth it.

“The more comfortable we got, the more we loved the idea of the national stage,” said UCLA’s Josh Rebholz, senior associate athletic director for external relations. “We surveyed our fans and asked them how they felt about playing on Sunday of a holiday weekend and the response was fine, so we went ahead with it.”

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