With the caveat that some of you will not care about this at all while others will find this fascinating, here goes nothing: CBS’s loss could turn into a large piece of good fortune for ESPN on Thanksgiving weekend.
CBS and ESPN have long split the most valuable rights package in college sports - SEC football - with the Eye getting first pickings and the Worldwide Leader taking everything after that. And having first pick of the SEC football litter usually means taking the Iron Bowl, the Deep South holy war between Alabama and Auburn, teams that have combined to appear in the last five national championship games (winning four of them) while staging some absolute classics along the way.
But deep inside the SEC’s contract with CBS is that a program can only appear on CBS five times in a season, and this Saturday’s tilt between AP No. 1 Mississippi State and No. 4 Alabama in Tuscaloosa will be the Tide’s fifth CBS appearance this fall. The network has already broadcast Alabama’s wins over Florida, Texas A&M and LSU and its loss to Ole Miss. Saturday’s date will be Mississippi State’s third game on CBS, following wins over Auburn and Kentucky.
With CBS locked out of the Iron Bowl, the conference announced Monday that the Egg Bowl will be shown Saturday, Nov. 29 at 3:30 p.m. ET, which means ESPN gets Auburn at Alabama at 7:15 p.m. ET that same day. It will be the first time the Egg Bowl has aired on broadcast television since NBC showed the game way back in 1964.ESPN, meanwhile, gets the Iron Bowl for just the third time in its history, and the first time since 2007, Nick Saban‘s first year in Tuscaloosa.
Of course, there is the possibility that CBS could get its maximum allotment of Crimson Tide and not cede possibly the largest audience of the season away to ESPN - Mississippi State just has to beat Alabama on Saturday. A Bullodgs win all but guarantees they’ll head to Oxford on Thanksgiving Saturday playing for a guaranteed spot in the College Football Playoff opposite their arch-rivals, relegating the Iron Bowl to consolation status.
So if you’re in midtown Manhattan and hear a distinct clanga clanga clanga emitting from the CBS offices on Saturday afternoon, now you’ll know why.