Quick Hit On Oregon-Ohio State TV Announcement

You might have caught the news that FOX would be televising Oregon-Ohio State on 9/11 in their network's marquee slot of Noon Eastern Time.  I had a recurring of responses and they involved what games FOX didn't announce.

The announcement was made on The Herd with Colin Cowherd.  

Today on @TheHerd, FOX Sports' @mulvihill79 revealed an important weekend of programming this fall:@OhioStateFB hosts @oregonfootball on September 11 for @CFBONFOX Big Noon Saturday, followed that night by @Yankees at @Mets on FOX and Sunday's Week 1 @NFLonFOX doubleheader. pic.twitter.com/C1f5KUs7R4

— FOX Sports PR (@FOXSportsPR) May 13, 2021

I think its important to note that this announcement was centered around the weekend of 9/11 and 9/12.  This wasn't a college football centered announcement.  This was a "We got some big stuff planned for the 9/11 weekend".  Note that they didn't give away their full plans for the weekend either as they have an opening in the mid-afternoon for college football and announced nothing about it, so that doesn't mean for sure that a specific Big 12, Pac-12 or Big Ten game will be on ABC in primetime.  This programming announcement had a focus on specific tentpole events that would lead into the NFL schedule, which was released the prior evening.

The second thing is that there was an assumption that FOX chose this game over Ohio State-Michigan or another Big Ten game.  The fact is that we don't know that either.   We don't have any clue about the draft orders that are associated with these conferences except for the times that they discuss them in public. If this was more of a college football centered announcement, Mike Mulvihill would have been discussing if they had taken Auburn-Penn State, Notre Dame-Wisconsin, Oklahoma-Texas, Notre Dame-Stanford and Ohio State-Michigan.

But it wasn't, and that's OK. The fact that both they and ESPN made game announcements (Egg Bowl to Thanksgiving this year and 2022) was great, because near this time last year, we were told that TV announcements would be delayed and we ended up with a summer of rescheduling.  No one found that fun.  I find the fact that anything was announced today was a positive and I'm looking forward with some optimism, and I'm a pessimist by nature, to a nice day and evening of schedule updates in about 2 weeks.