When the 2024-25 broadcast season kicks off in September, Fox will have to forge ahead without its highest-rated primetime series, a two-hour block that defied both gravity and the ongoing erosion of TV usage. But as WWE SmackDown gets set to shuffle off to NBCUniversal’s USA Network, a worthy replacement is primed to set up shop in the window formerly occupied by the spandex-and-suplex crowd.
These are big boots to fill. With an average draw of 824,250 adults 18-49 per episode, SmackDown was this season’s third-biggest draw in the dollar demo, trailing only CBS’ Survivor and 60 Minutes, and one of just a handful of shows that managed to grow its ratings versus the year-ago period.
While nearly all the TV metrics favored a renewal of SmackDown—the Friday night wrestling showcase was one of the 10 youngest-skewing programs on TV in 2023-24, and its audience composition should have made it a must-buy for advertisers looking to engage with the under-50 set—Fox couldn’t generate enough ad revenue from the property to justify bringing it back for a sixth season.
According to media buyer estimates, the average unit cost for a 30-second spot in SmackDown sold during last year’s upfront bazaar was a little over $50,000 a pop, a figure nowhere near in keeping with the show’s deliveries. (By way of comparison, ABC’s The Bachelor, which trailed SmackDown in the demo by some 1,300 viewers, commanded a rate that was three times higher.) And while the pricing disparity is arguably more a function of ingrained snobbery than measurable performance, it’s now clear that fans who supported the Friday night wrasslin’ juggernaut weren’t sufficiently upscale for Fox’s advertising partners.
Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch all but said as much last fall during the company’s first quarter earnings call. “Based on our analysis, we were not hitting the advertising numbers due to the WWE audience,” Murdoch told investors last November, which is a roundabout way of saying that SmackDown’s fanbase was too down-market to justify ad rates commensurate with the show’s considerable ratings success. Murdoch went on to add that the drag on pricing was exacerbated by the show’s seeming inability to move the needle on retransmission-consent revenue. Thus, after a five-year partnership, it was time for Fox to move on from the WWE.
Which is where Fox’s college football portfolio enters the conversation. As was announced earlier this year, Fox this fall will carve out a new Friday night football package that it hopes will out-deliver (and out-earn) the erstwhile time slot occupant.
Beginning Friday, Sept. 13, with a matchup between preseason No. 17 Arizona and No. 22 Kansas State, Fox will launch a weekly primetime college football block that draws heavily from the network’s portfolio of Big Ten and Big 12 rights. A number of games will feature Pac-12 defectors USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon; in fact, the sudden, rapid expansion of the Big Ten played a significant role in the creation of this new college football window.
While blue-chippers like Ohio State and Michigan won’t be suiting up for Fox’s first season under the Friday night lights, the protocols behind the selection of nationally televised Big Ten games effectively prevented the conference’s biggest programs from appearing in the new window. Under the selection process, Fox, CBS and NBC each call dibs on 15 must-see Big Ten matchups—naturally, the Buckeyes and Wolverines get snapped up first—and any games that aren’t spoken for within those top 45 picks usually end up on various cable or streaming platforms. In the case of Fox, the four transfer schools created a surfeit of broadcast-worthy game inventory, a windfall that coincided nicely with its ambitions to establish a new college football window.
From Fox’s perspective, the combination of additional games and the underutilized real estate that is Friday prime—a window that isn’t exactly crowded with live sports options—made this a no-brainer. Fox already is all but synonymous with football, as the sport accounts for more than 60% of the network’s overall consumption, so a push into the wilds of fall Fridays is a good fit for the brand and its bottom line. (While it’s early in the upfront sales process, media buyers say that units in the Friday night games are pricing between $10,000 and $15,000 higher than what Fox was getting for SmackDown.)
Fox’s initiative was further helped along by the boilerplate in Oregon and Washington’s contracts with the Big Ten, which stipulated that both programs would agree to play in Friday night games. They’ll be hard to miss; Washington travels to Rutgers on Sept. 27 before hosting UCLA in mid-November, while Oregon hosts Michigan State on Oct. 4 and hits the road for a game against Purdue two weeks later.
Other interesting Friday night dates include a Rutgers-USC game that will lead out of Game 1 of the World Series, and a Black Friday matchup between Utah and UCF. While the USC game will make for a late start back on the East Coast, Fox’s deliveries for the left half of the country could still be pretty solid, especially if the Dodgers are representing the National League come October.
Not showing up for Fox’s inaugural slate of Friday night games is Deion Sanders’ ratings darlings, the Colorado Buffaloes. Despite an unspectacular 4-8 finish last season, Coach Prime’s charges remain in high demand, so much so that Fox was not able to rustle up a space for the team on its primetime schedule. That said, Fox execs believe the audience that tunes into the new showcase will be sufficiently large to make Friday night more of a destination for big-reach teams in the years to come.
“Fox is football, and our new Friday night package will make Fox the leader in America’s game throughout the weekend,” said Mike Mulvihill, president, insight and analytics, Fox Corp., back when the package was originally announced. “We’ve built our collegiate business by seizing opportunities in previously underutilized timeslots. … 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.”
If the new package takes off, Fox will look to leverage its new fall Friday audiences to help further build its Big East basketball deliveries in the spring, which in turn will give way to its Friday night UFL offerings. In effect, Fox will have a new live-sports mechanism in place from September through May of each year. None of this would be possible if the company hadn’t parted ways with SmackDown.
While Fox’s college football window officially opens on Sept. 13, its cable sibling FS1 will help warm up the crowd with primetime games on Aug. 30 (West Virginia-Wisconsin) and Sept. 6 (Duke-Northwestern). The network’s Friday night schedule will close out with the Mountain West Championship on Dec. 6.
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