NBC’s Primetime Big Ten Showcase Has Advertisers Going Hog Wild
College football may be cannibalizing itself like the butcher in the Richard Scarry books—a pig, mind you—who sells bacon and ham to the other animals in Busytown, but even as swinish greed grinds a hundred years of tradition into so much pink slime, the TV servings have never been more appetizing.
Much like a cartoon hog who merrily hustles pork chops for his daily bread, this really shouldn’t make a lick of sense—rapacious realignment is the trichinosis lurking in the exquisite tenderloin that is college football—but such are the inherent contradictions of capital. You may make yourself sick by gorging on Busytown ham, but damn it if it ain’t tasty.
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Eight days from now, NBC will kick off its inaugural B1G Saturday Night window, a primetime feast that will go head-to-head with ABC’s Saturday Night Football. The collective national hankering for the soon-to-be continent-straddling megaconference is such that Big Ten football will be all but inescapable this fall. The Rosemont, Ill.-based league will have games airing on the big-reach broadcast TV networks from noon to midnight (give or take).
NBC picked up the rights to the Big Ten as part of a seven-year, $7 billion package it shares with CBS and Fox. The conference is already powering college football’s most-watched TV window—Fox’s Big Noon Saturday has been the top-rated package for two consecutive seasons—and with the new NBC offering leading out of CBS’ 3:30 p.m. EDT game, the Big Ten is poised to steal shares from that other monolith down South.
As Penn State alum and BSN analyst Todd Blackledge sees it, football is electric when it’s played under the lights. “To me, college football in primetime just looks bigger, it feels bigger, it sounds bigger,” Blackledge said Wednesday during an NBC media call. “I love doing primetime football games.” The chance to call nighttime games played a key role in Blackledge’s decision to jump ship from CBS to ESPN in 2006, where he put in 17 years before joining the NBC team in February.
While the former Nittany Lions QB and 1982 national champion didn’t necessarily want to leave ESPN, where he’d called a College Football Playoff game for nine years running, NBC made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. “Just the actual contract that they ended up offering me in terms of compensation and length, at this point in my career and my life, it was too good for me to say no to,” Blackledge said.
Advertisers are having a hard time passing up the new Big Ten package as well, even though the cost of entry is fairly steep. Media buyers with skin in the game say NBC is commanding north of $100,000 for each 30-second ad unit in BSN, similar to the going rate for time in the network’s NFL lead-in, Football Night in America. Given the ad dollars in play, NBC clearly expects to hit ratings pay dirt with the Big Ten; per Nielsen, the Sunday night studio show last season averaged 7.24 million viewers per week.
NBC’s first primetime Big Ten matchup will feature a revival of the old West Virginia-Penn State rivalry, which dates back to 1904. This marks the 60th meeting between the two teams, which last squared off back in 1992; you can probably guess why the tradition was sidelined for 31 years. (Hint: Penn State joined the Big Ten in 1993.) Scheduling nonconference games requires infinite patience and a whole lot of wheel greasing, and the two schools had been working together to reignite the rivalry for more than a decade.
“I couldn’t have scripted it any better,” Blackledge said. “To be in my old alma mater in Happy Valley, for a game we used to play every year: It’s going to be exciting to be a part of. I think the conference is in a great place.”
When Blackledge later offered a scouting report on Penn State’s QB1, Drew Allar, it was as if he were also eyeing up the new NBC package. “The expectations are through the roof,” Blackledge said of the 19-year-old, who’ll likely benefit from his team’s highly productive running game. The difference between the Big Ten’s primetime showcase and the howitzer-armed Allar? As Blackledge put it, “He’s got the talent to be a great player, but I don’t think that’s going to happen overnight.”
Given NBC’s upcoming schedule—it’s got Ohio State and Notre Dame in South Bend on Sept. 23—overnight success for the Saturday showcase is an eminently reasonable goal.
And so begins another season of college football, in all its sins and graces. You may not want to see how the sausage gets made in Busytown (or Rosemont, for that matter), but you’re still going to spend your fall Saturdays pigging out on football.
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