It was great to talk to ESPN’s Burke Magnus. Two sections to this podcast. The first 15 minutes is a straight one-on-one interview with Burke where we discuss:
– College Football Bowl season recap
– Burke’s thoughts on the move away from New Year’s Eve for the CFP semifinals
– We talked about Burke’s comments a few weeks ago on John Ourand’s podcast where Burke had said that the empty seats at some of the Bowl games wasn’t a problem for ESPN or really any problem at all
-Plans for shoring up ESPN2’s daytime lineup in the wake of moving First Take to ESPN a year ago
Then I brought in Matt Sarzyniak, who spends a lot of time focusing on men’s college football and college basketball schedules for some scheduling related questions that included:
– do they use any historical TV ratings data when making college football game selections?
– How has getting rid of a lot of the exclusivity clauses within TV windows positively affected ESPN’s ability to craft a schedule on a weekly basis?
– Back in the day when ESPN had to program around NASCAR windows, how did it impact scheduling?
– Will there be college sports exclusives in the upcoming ESPN OTT app in the near future?
– Matt noted ACC associate commissioner Michael Strickland’s comments that TV networks looking for particular matchups on particular weekends and asked if any of that goes on with the weeknight matchups.
– What are ESPN plans around shoulder programming for its F1 races
Matt Sarzyniak: Website, Twitter
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