Every season fans wait on the edge of a knife to see when their team’s biggest games will be played and on what channel, but rarely do they understand the process that goes into making those selections.
There are massive battles between television networks over the choosing of time slots, with some back-and-forth between the networks that ultimately helps decide who plays when and where.
The networks go back and forth selecting various games based on their rights deals, choosing to prioritize some over others.
FOX executive Mike Mulvihill recently joined FOX analyst Joel Klatt to give a behind-the-scenes look at how the sausage is made. He began with the first selection his network made when it came to 2024 games.
“We don’t really earn our salaries by picking Michigan–Ohio State No. 1. Right?” Mulvihill explained. “Like any college football fan would see that that’s the obvious first selection. Then when you start thinking about those next couple choices it gets a little more interesting.”
The second and third selections for Mulvihill and the FOX crew were particularly intriguing. He walked through the thought process on both.
FOX makes its second major game selection
The second game that FOX selected was a big non-conference matchup early in the year, one that highlights not only conference realignment but also last year’s playoff picture.
“We felt this year that Texas-Michigan was probably a top-three game just on its own merits, but there’s also a consideration of what else is available on that date?” Mulvihill said. “And there are days where you might downgrade the top pick a little bit on a specific date because you feel like the second-best game and the third-best game on that date are actually pretty good. So there’s not that much of an urgent need to get the best available game on that date.
“In the case of the Texas-Michigan game on Sept. 7, we really felt like if we didn’t get that game it was a long way down to the No. 2 and then an even longer way down to the No. 3. So we wanted to make sure that we locked in the top choice on a date where we didn’t necessarily feel there was a great depth of high-quality inventory. So Michigan-Ohio State is the one, Texas-Michigan becomes the two, then we had a really fascinating conversation about what to do with the third pick.”
So what are some of the things that go into picking games? Well, believe it or not, FOX actually consults some of its analysts like Klatt for input on who might be better than expected, etc.
“We do have very in-depth conversations with you and some of our other analysts where we just focus on the football,” Mulvihill told Klatt. “We just focus on the quality of potential matchups and which teams we think are going to have big years.
“In the case of that No. 3 pick, we probably debated that pick more than any other single pick in the history of college football on FOX because there were two dates that were in play that we thought were especially strong. One is Oct. 12 where Ohio State will go out west and play Oregon, one of the best games of the season, not just in the Big Ten but probably in all of college football. The other date that’s really interesting is No. 2. There are two, I would say, ultra-premium games on that date. One is Ohio State going to Penn State, very traditional Big Ten matchup. The other is Oregon coming east to play Michigan in the Big House.”
FOX punts on the No. 3 draft pick
It might surprise you to learn that of those choices, FOX actually decided to punt its rights to another network. Mulvihill didn’t disclose the particulars of that deal because the fallout has yet to be publicly announced.
But he did provide some unique insight on all the factors that went into making a decision.
“When you select a date, you’re selecting the date, you’re not selecting a specific game,” he explained. “So if we were to pick Nov. 2, when the time comes, when we get two weeks out of that date, we’ll actually make a selection of whether we want Ohio State-Penn State or Oregon-Michigan. For now you just take that date and you maintain the flexibility to decide later what game you’ll actually take.”
FOX, remember, did not make a pick, though.
“Why was this decision so difficult?” Mulvihill said. “A lot of factors came into play. One is simply the quality of that Ohio State-Oregon game. One is the novelty of having a matchup of a traditional Big Ten power with a West coast school in the first season of the Big Ten going to West coast expansion. A third factor is that we have built our FOX College Football identity around the idea of playing our best games at noon ET, 11 a.m. CT.
“We have built that into the most-watched game of the week in college football. We have an enormous pride in it. I take a lot of personal pride in what we have built there. And for us to take the Ohio State-Oregon game, that’s obviously a game that we can’t play at noon ET, 9 a.m. PT, so it would trigger a domino effect where we would have to play later in the day, another network would get to play in our noon window, we would have to put a lesser game on in the noon window. So there were just implications of taking a game that we couldn’t play at noon ET.”
There are at least two other major factors that FOX considered, one of which has almost nothing to do with sports.
“In addition to all that, other factors that have nothing to do with football but that do play into our decision-making, that Nov. 2 date is three days before the presidential election and there will be a lot of political money in our advertising marketplace this year,” Mulvihill said. “And the idea of being in control of that date, having the optionality to take Ohio State-Penn State or Michigan-Oregon just a few days before the election and all that campaign money that will come with it, that really resonated with me. In a situation where those two dates were very close and you can make an argument for either one, the political element mattered.”
Another is ongoing deal-making with other entities.
“We also think about renewals that we have coming with our distributors. You can obviously get FOX via an antenna, but most people get it via a bundle, whether that’s cable or satellite or now we have Internet-distributed bundles via YouTubeTV or others, and we are occasionally faced with the need to renew our deals with those distributors and we want to make sure that we have the most compelling games that we have as those renewals come up,” Mulvihill said. “So without revealing too much we do have significant renewals coming up this fall. And sometimes the geography of where those companies that we’re dealing with are particularly strong play into the games that we want to select.”
Many factors go into picking games for TV
The bottom line is that there are myriad factors that go into creating a college football TV schedule. The way the process unfolds probably isn’t what many fans would expect.
Still, Mulvihill’s insight into the entire ordeal goes a long way toward easing understanding.
“There are all these factors in terms of the strength of the game, the Big Ten expansion, the power of the Big Noon brand, what that means to us as a company, where the advertising money could be, where the distribution money could be, all those things come into play,” Mulvihill said. “The choice of where that third pick could come into play, it was the most intensely debated college football draft pick that we have ever had, and in the end the choice that we made was we traded the pick. We didn’t make the choice. The choice was so difficult that we just didn’t make it. We can trade our picks in this selection process just like you trade picks in the NFL Draft. And we actually came to a solution that worked out really well for everybody.”
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