FOX to broadcast weekly Friday night college football game in 2024

FOX will broadcast a college football game in a primetime slot on Friday night each week this upcoming season, according to The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand. The network announced the news shortly after the report.

The games will feature teams from the Big Ten, Big 12 and Mountain West, all leagues that FOX has existing broadcast rights agreements with. The game schedule, which is collectively worked out by the networks annually in May, has yet to be decided and therefore FOX doesn’t have a prospective slate of Friday featured games.

“FOX is football, and our new Friday night package will make FOX the leader in America’s game throughout the weekend,” Fox president of insight and analytics Michael Mulvihill said in the release announcing the programming. “We’ve built our collegiate business by seizing opportunities in previously underutilized timeslots, first with BIG NOON SATURDAY and now on Friday nights. Our goal this fall is to have the No. 1 college football game on both Fridays and Saturdays and the top NFL game on Sundays.”

And the new featured games on Friday night aren’t going to usurp the “Big Noon Saturday” game that FOX has built up around its pregame show, “Big Noon Kickoff,” according to Marchand. In the release, FOX noted that its noon games have included the most-watched single game each of the past three seasons. And in 2023, the big noon game averaged just more than 6.7 million viewers a week, the best season on record for the programming.

One of the biggest consistent ratings bonanza’s for FOX in that noon slot is the annual clash between Michigan and Ohio State to end the regular season. Each of the past three seasons, that game has turned in monster ratings as the Wolverines and Buckeyes competed with a Big Ten title game berth and College Football Playoff stakes on the line.

The 2023 matchup, with both teams entering undefeated, brought in 19.07 million viewers, according to Sports Media Watch, which is the second-highest viewership in the history of the rivalry. In addition, the 9.0 rating is the third-highest on record behind only the 2006 “Game of the Century” and the 2016 matchup.

Those sort of titanic matchups are not going to be moved out of the noon slot that FOX has carefully curated.

The real estate to broadcast games on Friday night recently came open for FOX, Marchand noted, as the network didn’t renew rights to broadcast WWE on Friday nights.