College football’s ‘best opening week ever’ no easy task for ESPN
College football has arrived in 2016, and what ESPN is billing as the “best opening week ever” took a lot of work to put together.
We’ve had a teaser for the 2016 college football season. Cal and Hawaii played a Friday late night game from Sydney, Australia and got things rolling.
But the big guns will be pulled out of the holster over Labor Day weekend, and ESPN is treating fans to 100 consecutive hours of college football programming beginning on Thursday, Sept. 1, and it was no simple task to pull it all together.
ALSO READ: Great College Football Broadcasters You May Not Know
Just from their own perspective, ESPN has the flagship station, ESPN2, ESPN3, ESPNU, the SEC Network and ABC to juggle around. Add to that trying to secure the rights to games which other networks may own (such as the earlier mentioned Cal-Hawaii matchup, which had to be secured from the Pac-12 Network), and attempting to come up with a manageable schedule can be a harrowing experience.
More from College Football News
- Could the Virginia Cavaliers go winless this season?
- College Football Rankings 2023: Projected AP Top 25 for Week 5
- Sean McDonough sets social media on fire with hilarious quip
- Bet $10, Win $400 GUARANTEED Plus $150 in No-Sweat Bets on With FanDuel + DraftKings CFB Promos!
- ESPN College GameDay Week 4 live stream: Watch Notre Dame vs. Ohio State
The men in charge of deciding which games you’ll get to view on what days and which times they’ll fall don’t simply pull out a calendar and slap a few names in there. It takes planning, teamwork and a lot of long hours.
Nick Dawson, vice president of programming and acquisitions, and Kurt Dargis, director of programming and acquisitions, are the two lucky people at ESPN who are blessed with such a daunting task.
“This is the strongest slate of games we’ve ever had on the opening weekend of the season,” Dawson said in an exclusive phone interview. “We really approached this weekend as kind of a five-day festival of college football.”
We think it’s really important that the sport launches in a meaningful way given that this is the one weekend of the year where we don’t have NFL competition.”
And if by meaningful Dawson means premier matchups, that’s exactly what fans will get. Here’s a quick view of some of the best games that are in store for the long weekend of college football.
Thursday, Sept. 1:
Friday, Sept. 2:
Saturday, Sept. 3:
 #18 Georgia |  #22 North Carolina | 5:30 PM |   |
Sunday, Sept. 4:
 #10 Notre Dame |  | 7:30 PM |  |
Monday, Sept. 5:
Those games are just part of the 47 total games ESPN will be broadcasting on their various platforms over the Labor Day weekend.
The neutral site games – such as Georgia-North Carolina and USC-Alabama – are scheduled years in advance when the teams agree to the matchups. It’s ESPN’s job to figure out on which networks to place them and how best to fit them into the schedule.
All of this juggling and puzzle-piece fitting starts practically as soon as those games are agreed to, with networks, school administrators and venues entering into discussions and negotiations.
“It’s kind of a three-party process between the schools, the organizers and us,” Dargis told us. “It takes about that long to get these done.”
There are some big headliner games beyond this season which we’ve already begun working on. Next year we have Michigan and Florida in Arlington. Alabama is playing Florid State in Atlanta on Saturday and Tennessee is playing Georgia Tech in Atlanta on Monday night. BYU is playing LSU in Houston…so, we’re working on those games in the outer years and our goal is always to have those things done two, three or four years ahead of time.”
Conference and team schedules aren’t released until just prior to the season beginning, which creates a big crunch time workload for Dawson, Dargis and their teams.
“It’s a process that starts at the national championship game. We start having meetings with our conference partners, and that process goes on throughout the winter and spring until about mid-May.” Dargis said.
“Once we know or have a very solid idea of which games are in our bucket we start figuring out the whole big picture of where we place them.”
Having a Sunday open without the NFL dominating the calendar provided ESPN with an opportunity to treat fans to something special, which is why they approached Texas and Notre Dame about moving their game to Sunday to be featured on ABC.
“Once we knew we had that game in our bucket, we kind of assessed that we had more than enough high-quality games on Saturday,” Dawson told us. “We liked the idea of trying to move something to Sunday, which is something we haven’t done in the past in terms of an ABC Sunday window.”
We talked to ABC, and they were interested, and that’s when we approached the schools. To Texas’ credit and Notre Dame’s credit, they pretty quickly got to the point where they were willing to do it, based on the exposure opportunity of kind of being the only game in town on Sunday night.”
After this first few weeks of pre-scheduled college football saturation, the team at ESPN will have to become flexible and ready to change on the fly, as matchups can become more or less tasty depending on the previous week’s outcome, and mother nature is not always willing to cooperate either.
“That’s the best part of the job, after the first three weeks of the season,” Dawson said. “We’re picking games twelve days ahead of time, sometimes even six days. It’s a huge puzzle every week, but to be able to react to stories as they develop throughout the season is when it gets fun”
Kurt and I have been kind of doing rain dances over here just to keep the rain away for the past week. [Weather] is something you can’t predict…we’re fortunate in the industry to have the depth of platforms – we can probably be as nimble or more nimble than anybody else in terms of reacting to those things on the fly.”
With all the different platforms and stations (not to mention the ACC Network being added in a couple of years), ESPN is able to provide fans with the wide variety of nationally relevant games, as well as regional action all over the nation.
Next: Predicting 2016 College GameDay Locations
So strap in, fans. You have what has been billed as (and may very well be) the best opening week of college football ever. Let us know which games you are most looking forward to over the long holiday weekend.