When you think back to the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) on television I’m sure ESPN, and by extension ABC, are the networks that immediately pop into your mind. During negotiations early in the 2000’s ABC became “unhappy with the new structure” which saw the BCS expand to 5 games instead of 4 going into effect for the 2006 season.
As such, Fox ended up swooping in and winning the BCS television package rights for 2006-09 in one of the more strange setups in recent college football. Remember, this was a time before Fox had a steady presence in college football. Prior to 2007, the Fox network had televised the Cotton Bowl for the past 8 seasons but was largely limited to regional telecasts distributed through their Fox Sports Network (FSN) packages.
So when it was announced in November 2004 that Fox had won the BCS rights for 4 seasons totaling $320 million it was met with a lot of skepticism and surprise.
It was also a bit of a weird set up, too. For one, the Rose Bowl had to remain extra super duper special and was not part of the negotiations process as those games remained on ABC. This included all 4 of the Rose Bowl Games played from 2006-09 (the 2006 Rose Bowl was the last with Keith Jackson on the call) as well the 2010 BCS National Championship Game (crowning the winner of the 2009 season) which aired on ABC because it was played at the Rose Bowl.
Below is a full list of all these BCS games on Fox:
2006
Fiesta Bowl
Boise State 43-42 over Oklahoma
Orange Bowl
Louisville 24-13 over Wake Forest
Sugar BowlÂ
LSU 41-14 over Notre Dame
BCS National Championship
Florida 41-14 over Ohio State
Fox couldn’t have dreamed for a better game for their first BCS broadcast. Everyone and their mother remembers the epic overtime upset by Boise State in a thriller over Oklahoma. It’s one of the best games of my lifetime, and despite being the first aired, goes down as the classic Fox broadcast from this era.
Now that Dave Clawson feels like he’s been at Wake Forest for such a long time, this Jim Grobe-led Demon Deacons team making the Orange Bowl truly seems like it was pre-internet age. This was Louisville’s last season in the Big East and they really should’ve been playing at the Power 5 level with a very talented team.
I’m not sure I remember this year’s Sugar Bowl. Huh, weird.
The first standalone BCS National Championship Game featured Florida and Ohio State facing each other for the first time ever. The no. 1 Buckeyes were undefeated and favored by 7 points. Ted Ginn, Jr. took the opening kickoff to the house, too. This game was super hyped but Urban Meyer truly announced his arrival on the national stage as the Gators finished the game outscoring OSU 41-7 for an easy win.
2007
Sugar Bowl
Georgia 41-10 over Hawaii
Fiesta Bowl
West Virginia 48-28 over Oklahoma
Orange Bowl
Kansas 24-21 over Virginia Tech
BCS National Championship
LSU 38-24 over Ohio State
This Fox postseason led off with black-clad Georgia led by quarterback Matthew Stafford absolutely destroying then undefeated Hawaii in New Orleans. The Warriors turned it over 8(!) times and quarterback Colt Brennan (RIP) never had a chance.
West Virginia was a hot pick to win the National Championship but tripped up twice, including in their regular season finale against Pittsburgh. Their high-flying rushing offense would trounce Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl led by a young Sam Bradford.
Kansas in a major bowl game and winning a major bowl game!?? It feels like a typo. The Jayhawks would win 13 games over the next 2 seasons of the Mark Mangino era and have not won more than 3 games in a single season since.
The 2nd National Championship Game on Fox brought us rumors of Les Miles heading to Michigan and instead he stayed for 2007 and beyond as the Tigers of LSU were the first 2-loss title winners since 1960. The 2007 season was WILD.
2008
Orange Bowl
Virginia Tech 20-7 over Cincinnati
Sugar Bowl
Utah 31-17 over Alabama
Fiesta Bowl
Texas 24-21 over Ohio State
BCS National Championship
Florida 24-14 over Oklahoma
The first BCS Fox game of the 2008 season was Virginia Tech beating Cincinnati led by this Brian Kelly guy as coach. This remains the Hokies last major bowl victory and their only one since 1995.
The Sugar Bowl saw undefeated Utah upset 10-point favorite Alabama after jumping out to a 21-0 1st quarter in one of the original aught’s “didn’t want to be there” performances coming off the clash of titans loss in the SEC Championship against Florida. It worked out well for Utah who parlayed this into a National Championship, no wait, their season ended unbeaten and 2nd in the final AP Poll.
Texas was co-division champs (remember divisions in the Big 12?) with Oklahoma but the Sooners won the tie-breaker despite Texas beating Oklahoma in the regular season. The Horns would beat Ohio State (who lost the Big Ten co-championship tie-breaker to Penn State) on a last-second slant touchdown pass from Colt McCoy that broke for the game-winner.
The BCS National Championship saw Florida pull away late in this Tim Tebow “The Promise” season getting past Sam Bradford and Oklahoma. Bradford would later drown his tears with a $78 million rookie contract including $50 million guaranteed as the last No. 1 overall pick before the NFLPA restructured the NFL Draft pay scale.
2009
Sugar Bowl
Florida 51-24 over Cincinnati
Fiesta Bowl
Boise State 17-10 over TCU
Orange Bowl
Iowa 24-14 over Georgia Tech
January 1, 2010 saw Cincinnati in their second-straight major bowl game except Brian Kelly had been at Notre Dame 21 days earlier and avoided this big old beatdown in Tim Tebow’s final collegiate game.
If you recall, this was the post-season with 5 undefeated teams which brought us the WAC vs. Mountain West matchup between Boise State and Texas Christian. The Broncos led 10-0 until late in the 2nd half and TCU came back to tie the game before a 4th quarter Doug Martin touchdown won it for Boise.
Georgia Tech in a BCS game with Kansas doing it just a few years prior. Truly, all things are possible. That triple option for the Yellow Jackets laid a stink bomb with 2 completions and only 143 rushing yards. If it wasn’t Iowa, it could’ve been a 40-point win.
Patterson foot injury and Keeley officially gone. OMB
How bad is the foot injury?
As far as I’ve heard it was reported yesterday evening and unknown how bad it is pending an update today or tomorrow.
O’Malley said not a lisfranc fwiw. Hopefully not that bad, but foot injuries on big guys never seem to be easy so I’m sort of bracing for some not great update.
Let’s have an UA shoe burning party.
Patterson has a foot sprain and is questionable for OSU partly pending pain tolerance playing on the sprain.
The question is: is Patterson with pain in his foot better than whoever would replace him (especially assuming that Patterson won’t have practiced that much in the 2 weeks)?
It’s tough to play the same quality with a painful foot.
Though what would he do – play against OSU and then take a couple of weeks off to heal before UNC?
Probably this. It would also allow Spindler to see some time at Guard this season as well.
Shut Patterson down as much as possible until a day or two before OSU and then hand the job off to someone else for a few weeks if necessary.
It would be nice to see Spindler in there. I presume they would go back to Kristofic at LG, though I guess we’ll see.
Other than the tackles, the rest of the line got to “meh” status really quickly.
Yeah and I guess I said Spindler because I just have a hunch that he will in fact be the third best guard on the team this year. He just wasn’t ready for playing last year.
I hope so, Krisotifc’s game experience with 21 (7 starts at LG) vs 2 games (0) for Spindler stands out to me. At this point late in camp, might just be better to go back to the guy familiar with the position and Alt at LT as a tie breaker now.
I’m kinda iffy on the Spindler hype until we see something. Great HS ranking but there’s been no indications he’s actually ready to play at the college level yet. Still pretty early, don’t think he’s a bust or anything.
That’s fair. Just looking at the two games after OSU I think it would be great to get Spindler some of that experience since I think regardless of who plays at guard in those games we win easily.
Hopefully he can then build on that and with some experience make the jump fully past Kristofic, who I don’t think is a bad option, just doesn’t have the high ceiling of potential that Spindler does.
Gotcha, makes sense to me. I agree at this point it seems like Kristofic has to be the LG if Patterson can’t go, but then do you switch the line again for the second game? For continuity, I would think if Kristofic does even a half decent job, he’s staying in until Patterson is back. No real need to mix it up on the OL if not necessary.
So I guess best case is that some of those games are blowouts and the whole second string OL can play quite a bit late to accomplish all the goals.
Go Irish.
One interesting tidbit with the new big 10 media deal is that there will be 8 games exclusively shown on peacock and that ND keeps it’s primetime slot as the NBC will only have the primetime slot when ND doesn’t have it basically. It seems they will only show a big 10 game at another time on peacock (but a peacock game could be shown at the same 7:30 slot too). So I don’t think a big 10 game will show up on NBC TV any other time than 7:30 (but a peacock exclusive game could be shown at other times).
A 2nd tidbit is that apparently Amazon prime was willing to pay more than either CBS or NBC were willing to pay for their slots.
Also, CBS games will be simulcast on paramount+
Not sure I follow the phrasing, the vast majority of primetime NBC college football will be Big10.
NBC will have 16 Big10 games in 2023 and then 15 from 2024-on (including Black Friday), all starting at 7:30pm. CBS will have Big10 in the 3:30 slot.
NBC will still have 2-3 primetime Notre Dame game, but I wouldn’t put it as quite the way you did.
Yea I just meant that ND could still have the 7:30 slot when it needs – 2 or 3 times a year. Such a thing wasn’t clear to me in earlier reports (or at least wasn’t clear how that was going to work).
Ah, gotcha. Given ND is still a ratings draw and everyone was saying Fox has the first pick of the best game, I definitely thought it made common sense NBC would want to keep the marquee ND home games on prime time, but I guess it’s good to see it in writing now.
Agreed. Just the way it had been reported that NBC got the 7:30 primetime slot made it unclear whether ND could still have a spot there. They definitely can and one can imagine that it would be pretty silly for NBC to not include ND at that time slot.
Though they seem excited about ND at 3:30 leading into a “primetime” big 10 game at 7:30.
Watching college football in a couple of years will be very different! I think probably on the whole for the better but I’m not sure!
NBC better get its shit together on Peacock in a hurry. The “quality” we saw last year during the Toledo game isn’t going to fly with a much larger audience.
I don’t remember what the problems were from last year but the advantage of adding more games around ND is that NBC will invest more in their college football infrastructure, announcers, etc.
Our new announcer booth doesn’t scream “investment in college football” to me, but I hope you’re right.
Peacock was (is?) laggy, lets commercials run over into game action, and locks you out of accessing other channels without logging out of the app and then logging back in.
Right, not now (with announcers). I’m hoping in 2 years when this kicks in things will improve.
I’d say there are 4 total games on this list that would be worth watching.
Needs more shots of the band, IMO.
Man I hated that Hawaii team. Watching Georgia piledrive them into the Superdome’s turf was very enjoyable.
Ugh, in the prediction thread for our floor for the season I predicted losing Keeley and P. Bowen and missing out on Hanifan and getting no quarterback.
I’m getting the feeling that the tOSU game could be sneaky important in convincing recruits to stay and poaching guys like the Pitt QB.