Seven hours of commercial free football…on a Saturday? Sign me up.
Now, I’m not one to wish summer away, but I’ll admit that I’m counting down the days until football season, when my weekend routine becomes wake up on Saturday, turn on College GameDay, and rot on the couch for the next 12 hours watching schools I know nothing about, then wake up on Sunday and turn on NFL Sunday Ticket and do it all over again.
I can’t wait.
One of the best parts of watching the NFL on Sundays is turning on Scott Hanson and watching NFL RedZone. The channel, first launched in 2009, offers coverage of key moments from all the games currently going on, so you never have to miss a big play or a scoring drive no matter what game you’re watching.
But fans recently became concerned over the future of RedZone after the NFL announced that ESPN had acquired the NFL Network in a deal that gave the league a 10% ownership stake in the “Worldwide Leader in Sports.” (I put that in quotation marks for a reason, read into that what you will).
Hanson quickly put some minds at ease when he announced that he would, in fact, continue to host RedZone on the new ESPN-owned NFL Network, which is great news.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell appeared on SportsCenter yesterday to address the future of the show, assuring fans that they shouldn’t expect to see any changes in the product. And he also hinted that ESPN may now be able to replicate it in other sports:
“ESPN purchased the RedZone name, and they will be able to utilize that for other sports, college football and other things, and I think that could be an exciting thing for our fans also to see a RedZone, maybe in college football or other sports. That’s something that they now own and have the ability to do that.”
ESPN had previously tried their version of a college football whip-around show with ESPN Goal Line. But with the acquisition of RedZone, the network could presumably take what works about the current NFL RedZone and easily transition that into a college football product.
Of course the college football viewing experience has improved a ton since the addition of multiview to platforms like YouTube TV, which allow you to watch up to four games at once. But with so many college games going on at once, it’s impossible to keep up with every single game that’s going on.
And if you’re not into sports, you may be asking, why would you care about what’s going on in a random game? Well the answer is sports betting. People are putting money on games that they would otherwise not be watching, which has no doubt contributed to the rise in viewership for college football. ESPN saw record-breaking numbers for college football last year, so you’ve got to think the demand is there for a RedZone-style product.
I just hope that if they actually do it, they do it right and stay true to everything viewers love about NFL RedZone. Nobody wants commercials or social justice lectures in the middle of their college football.
