College Football Playoff could rotate networks for national title game

ESPN, which has hosted college football's biggest game for the last decade, may have to share one of its toys with others in the media sandbox.

In a report from Front Office Sports, the College Football Playoff committee is considering rotating the national championship game among its media partners in the next contract. The committee — and by proxy, the NCAA — is hoping that having more than one network signed up as broadcasters of the event will drive up the rights fees in the next deal.

Per Front Office Sports:

"ESPN is on the tail end of a 12-year, $5.64 billion rights deal that pays the CFP an estimated $470 million a year. But ESPN’s contract, which includes exclusive rights to the National Championship, expires after the 2025 season.

"Virtually every major media player has expressed interest in the rights to the future 12-team playoff. The CFP has begun preliminary discussions about rights starting with the 2026 season. The contenders range from ESPN, Fox Sports, NBC Sports and Warner Bros. Discovery Sports to giant streamers Amazon Prime Video and Apple, as FOS has previously reported.

"The structure of the deal has not been agreed upon yet, however."

Save for Clemson's win over Alabama for the 2016 title and the Crimson Tide's win over Georgia in overtime a year later, the games themselves have hardly been thrilling. (Even those games elicited eyerolls from those who bemoaned the SEC's dominance over the years.) Eight of the nine championship games hosted by ESPN and ABC have had Clemson, Alabama, Georgia or some combination of the three. Perhaps some fatigue of the three schools had played some sort of a role, but so have been the blowouts. All but four of the games were decided by more than two touchdowns. Some of these contests were decided by the first quarter, leading to massive ratings drops within the telecasts. 

Georgia's win over TCU in January — a 65-7 demolition — was actually the least watched national championship game on record, which includes both the CFP era and the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) that preceded it from 1999 (for the 1998 season) until 2014 for the 2013 season. That game, with 17.22 million average viewers, had 5 million fewer viewers than the Peach Bowl between Georgia and Ohio State, and 4 million less than the Fiesta Bowl between TCU and Michigan. ESPN has "MegaCast" broadcasts of the national title game on its other networks at the same time as the main channel, yet those alternate feeds haven't made much of a difference in the ratings.

Will rotating the host network change the viewership patterns? Likely not since the network doesn't make a noticeable difference when it comes to the Super Bowl. It's about the teams themselves and how the landscape of the entire sport is viewed in a given year. Even in a sport with more than 120 "big-time" programs, there's a sense of inevitability when the same handful of teams are running roughshod over the entire country year after year.