ACC Football: Week 6 (10/4-10/5)

[BlueDevil2K]

So west coast teams should be prevented from playing at 7:30 local time when playing east coast teams? How about the inverse: east coast teams playing at noon local time when playing a west coast team?

For conference games, yes. The game ended after 2:30 AM Miami time. That's not in anybody's best interest. If Miami wants to schedule a game at UCLA without negotiating in a more reasonable kickoff time, that would be on them. When it's a game that was dictated by the conference, the fans of both teams should be able to watch. Kicking by 6 PM local time shouldn't be a terrible imposition.

9 AM isn't ideal, but it's not 2:30 AM.

 

[brevity]

Saturday 10:15pm or 10:30pm ET games on the main ESPN channel this season (according to Sports Media Watch)

Week 0 (08/24): None
Week 1 (08/31): New Mexico-Arizona (also TCU-Stanford on Friday 10:30pm ET)
Week 2 (09/07): Mississippi State-Arizona State
Week 3 (09/14): San Diego State-California
Week 4 (09/21): Kansas State-BYU
Week 5 (09/28): Arizona-Utah
Week 6 (10/05): Miami-California
Week 7 (10/12): Kansas State-Colorado (also Utah-Arizona State on Friday 10:30pm ET)
Week 8 (10/19): TBD (also Oklahoma State-BYU on Friday 10:15pm ET)

So far Miami is the only East Coast team to play an ESPN late night game. This would have been an easy fix: they could have swapped time slots with Kansas-Arizona State, 8pm ET on ESPN2.

 

[dlmzzz]

From the point of view of what is best for the students, this makes sense. From the point of view of viewers/fans, I think it's very east coast centric.

We know that the 8PM time slot is the most coveted, right? We've been very happy when Duke has gotten to play at that time. Well, that's true in the Pacific time zone too. If you want to build the college football fan base outside the Eastern time zone, you have to show good games in hours that are late for us. Good games really means games from good conferences. You can only show Boise State so many times a year. Since ESPN doesn't have Big10 games in their portfolio, that means Big 12 and ACC games.

In Brevity's list above, out of 7 weeks the late game has been the ACC twice, and the Big12 five times. That seems like the minimum to grow the ACC viewership out west. And if you want to close the gap with the SEC in terms of viewership, showing good games from your conference at a time slot where you won't compete with them sounds like a good way to do it.

BTW, Cal should be ecstatic about this. I am pretty sure they haven't gotten 2 headline time slots in a year in their past decade in the Pac12 (if I'm wrong about that, I would call it a fluke exception).