This college football season marks the last chance to watch the sport’s traditional, regional conferences. After a tumultuous summer that saw the cannibalization of the Pac-12 and an inevitable march toward a super league of the richest programs at the expense of most of the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision’s 133 teams, things kick off this weekend with a limited Week Zero slate of national broadcasts mostly of interest to die-hards or alumni of newly promoted FBS teams such as Jacksonville State.
This is also the 40th season since a Supreme Court decision deregulated the college football television market; the biggest rights contract signed since then, a $7 billion deal that spreads the Big Ten’s rights across three broadcast networks, commences this coming Thursday as Nebraska and Minnesota battle for the “$5 Bits of Broken Chair” trophy on Fox.
But what price will college football fans pay for that $7 billion deal — or ESPN’s $3 billion, 10-year pact with the SEC? To answer that question, we looked at all 910 games of this year’s FBS schedule and identified every linear television channel and streaming service to which the most rabid college football fanatic would need to subscribe to ensure they wouldn’t miss a single game.
It’s not the most straightforward task. Unlike North American pro sports leagues — which can offer complete subscriptions offering every out-of-market regular season game — college football rights are individually negotiated by each conference (or, for the four independent FBS teams, the schools themselves).
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First, the good news for cord-cutters: thanks to the aforementioned Big Ten deal and the ACC’s new contract that moves weekly games from Raycom Sports productions (typically broadcast on cable TV regional sports networks) to broadcast CW stations, more college football games will appear on free, over-the-air TV than ever before. Casual fans can catch around 150 games this season on their local NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox and CW stations for just the cost of an antenna.
The rest of the games, though, are spread across a dozen cable networks and two paid streaming services. Specifically, the college football completist will need a cable subscription that has access to ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SEC Network, ACC Network and Longhorn Network (the bespoke University of Texas channel, still airing games in the final season before that school joins the SEC). You’ll also need Fox Sports 1, Fox Sports 2, Big Ten Network, NFL Network, CBS Sports Network and the Pac-12 Networks. (Given the ill fortunes of the latter conference, this season is the likely swan song for their in-house broadcaster, too.)
On top of that, you’ll need an ESPN Plus streaming subscription, and one from NBC’s Peacock — which this year will carry a handful of Big Ten matchups alongside its annual exclusive Notre Dame game.
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(You can skip the FloFootball subscription, though; unlike previous seasons that saw bottom-tier FBS schools such as Massachusetts and New Mexico State on the pricey platform, their games will mostly be found on ESPN Plus this year.)
What will those 910 games cost? First, you’ll have to find a provider that even offers the full slate of cable channels; Pac-12 Networks, in particular, can be hard to come by — just one reason for that conference’s ongoing collapse. Streaming cable provider Fubo provides all of them, though, at its $84.99 per month tier. ESPN Plus is $9.99 a month, and Peacock another $5.99 on top of that. That’s $100.97 a month before taxes and fees, and you’ll need to buy them for all five months of the football season for a total of $504.85 — or 55 cents per game.
How does that stack up against other sports league offerings? Its most direct analog — NFL Sunday Ticket — offers about 220 games (the exact number depends on what NFL market you live in) for a promotional price of $299, or about $1.36 a game. NBA League Pass is just $99.99 for somewhere around 850 games depending on your market, so a little more than a dime per game. Major League Soccer’s deal with Apple provides 493 games for $99; also 20 cents a game. Major League Baseball’s online streaming package delivers about 2,200 out-of-market games for $149.99; that’s seven cents a game. And the NHL’s deal with ESPN brings out-of-market games into your home for just $9.99 a month; across the seven months of the season, that’s six cents a game.
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But only MLS includes local-market games. The other sports leagues include cable exclusives such as “Monday Night Football” on ESPN or TNT’s national NHL and NBA games. Add another $70 a month to each of those seasons — plus $41.95 for the Amazon Prime Video and Peacock subscriptions you’ll need for those NFL exclusives— and soccer comes out as the cheapest major sport: otherwise it’s $0.23 per game for MLB, $0.37 per game for the NHL, $0.40 per game for the NBA, and a whopping $2.54 for every game of the NFL schedule. (And that’s just for the regular season.)
That said — with realignment probably making college football unrecognizable for the foreseeable future, after all — $500 may be a small price to pay.
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