FARGO – The 2024 FCS Playoffs will receive a level of bowl exposure and sponsorship that the subdivision has never experienced.
Both of them will be aired by ABC on Dec 21 the NCAA release the updated FCS Championship Manual this year. It arrived at a meeting of ESPN and the NCAA back in January that enshrined this new part of the TV contract.
North Dakota State athletic director, and FCS playoff chairman, Matt Larsen mentioned in August that there was possibility that the Friday night semifinal would cease to exist. That will happen in an FCS first, with both games getting on national TV.
The games are listed for an 11 a.m. and 2:Both games will kick at 30 p.m and will be broadcast by ABC.
“If there was a way to have both of those games on Saturday, that would probably be ideal from a committee standpoint, from a bracket standpoint, but those are things that we’re still working on.” NDSU athletic director Matt Larsen said in August who is the FCS playoff committee chair.
The final FCS sem-final shown on network television was during the spring season with James Madison at Sam Houston in May of 2021. For a typical autumn season, no semifinal games of FCS have been broadcasted on a nationwide network in the past decade and a half.
The quarterfinal match will be aired also by ABC in the course of this year. One of the quarterfinal games on Dec. 14 will be televised by ABC, with a 2:30 p.m. central start time.
The last time in Vermillion, when NDSU beat South Dakota 45-17 the game was broadcasted by ABC and there was 1,000,000 and slope viewers.
There is also a shift in the TV lineup for the quarterfinals with a game on the Friday December 13 in the weekly line up being taken by ESPN. This is because that game will start at 8:00 P.M central time.
The other quarterfinal will remain in the traditional 11 AM start time on Saturday December 14, which NDSU has played in eight other times with the last being on December 11, when the Bison hosted East Tennessee State.
The last quarterfinal will also exclusively be available on ESPN Plus.
Similar to last year a second round game will be featured on ESPN 2. The year earlier Idaho’s triumph over Southern Illinois was viewer by 132,000 people.
Next week only the FCS Playoff Committee will come up with rankings of only ten teams. Those will be released Wednesday at 1 p.m. on ESPN2’s College Football Live.
Which was stated back in May, the FCS Championship Game will be on Monday night, January 6. Starting at 6 p.m. central time, that game will be on ESPN.
The shift to Monday was to go from the NFL to the FCS, which happened over the final Sunday of the regular season in the last two years.
but the NFL regular season concludes on Sunday, Jan. 5, and not having a game on Monday night — a night that football fans have grown accustomed to having an NFL game each Monday — the FCS inserted itself into the void.
A HUGE TV DAY
Saturday Dec. 21 may go down as one of the refurbished football days in terms of activities on the calendar for a very long time.
In addition to the two FCS semifinal games on that day, the new College Football Playoff will play its first round games.
TNT is to air two games, one in the afternoon at 11am and the second one in the evening at 3pm While ABC and ESPN will also broadcast the last first-round game at 7 pm.
I was equally entertained by this update from the NFL which also wanted to have its slice of that Saturday. In essence, by rule the NFL can start playing games on that Saturday and, as we have seen, they aren’t taking a gradual approach to entering the TV business.
Two-time defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City will face Houston at noon on NBC, followed by AFC North rivals Pittsburgh and Baltimore at 3:30 p.m. on FOX.
The NFL playing that day feeds into the fact why ABC was quick to pick on the FCS semifinals – to have a Friday slate of college football to counter the NFL.
Finally, the NCAA Division II national championship game will also be played on that day.
Even after the browsers have been opened, eyeballs will be in short supply to get viewers to the games they would prefer.
