Ohio State football is back and ESPN is breaking out their “Megacast” for a Thursday night prime-time game between the No. 2 Buckeyes and Indiana Hoosiers.
The ESPN Megacast has become a staple of the college football season. The National Championship game has been forever changed by the super-sized broadcast that allows fans to watch the game in almost anyway they could possibly want. ESPN has decided to bring that all-encompassing coverage to the regular season.
ESPN will broadcast seven different versions of the Ohio State-Indiana game across their various platforms.
- The standard broadcast will air on ESPN.
- The “Coaches Film Room” will be on ESPNews. It will feature Les Miles, Mack Brown, Gene Chizik, and Mark Helfrich.
- The “Homers Telecast” is on ESPNU. Dueling broadcast teams with ties to each school will take turns calling the game.
- ESPN will broadcast a live All-22 on ESPN3 for the first time.
- ESPN3 will also have a Data Center broadcast consisting of “on-screen graphic content ranging from analytics, real-time drive charts, win probability updates, curated social media reaction and more.”
- ESPN3 will once again have the Sky Cam — the camera on the wire above the field.
- “Command Center,” a mishmash of all the other broadcasts on one screen, will also be on ESPN3.
Why can’t we do this every Saturday?
The obvious question if ESPN is picking regular season games to Megacast is why this one? If they wanted to pick one game this weekend to go wall-to-wall coverage with across their myriad of networks, why not pick the biggest game of the weekend and maybe the regular season — No. 1 Alabama vs. No. 3 Florida State?
SI’s Richard Deitsch got the answer from ESPN Senior Coordinating Producer Ed Placey:
"Putting a MegaCast presentation on requires a lot of resources, including, production equipment, commentators and staffers. Also, ideally we prefer to have multiple linear networks available outside of the traditional telecast. Taking that all into account, it would be difficult to pull off the MegaCast production on a regular season Saturday that has a full slate of games across our networks throughout the day."
Based on that answer, it does not appear ESPN is going to beat this into the ground because they logistically can’t. However, I have a hard time believing any fan would be against ESPN doing this once a week if they could figure out how.
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The “Coaches Film Room” is one of the best things ever devised in sports broadcasting. It gives people another reason to stay with the game. This is especially important for ESPN with a game like Thursday night’s. The Buckeyes are 21-point favorites. If the game goes like the oddsmakers think it will, maybe ESPN will hold some viewers they otherwise wouldn’t because of the value added by the Megacast.