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Since the College Football Playoff started, ESPN has had the exclusivity of all three games each year. With the CFP expanding from four teams to 12 in the 2024 season, the CFP and ESPN have a new agreement in place. Which sees ESPN remaining the exclusive home for the College Football Playoff, costing Disney $7.8 billion in total through the 2031-32 season.
One of the more interesting aspects of this deal is that ESPN has the option to sublicense games. This is really going to come into play with the new combined sports streaming service between ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros Discovery that is set to launch this fall. This means Fox could end up hosting a game or two during the College Football Playoff.
ESPN already owns the rights to most of the bowl games during bowl season – those rights were not part of this new deal. The College Football Playoff is expanding this year, taking it from three Playoff games to eleven and giving ESPN a more extensive library of big games that it can broadcast or sublicense to its partners. This could ideally be huge for the new ESPN standalone streaming service that is set to launch next year. Considering this year’s national championship game had 25 million viewers, peaking at 28 million. It’s still a far cry from the Super Bowl, but being on a Monday Night, starting at 9 PM ET, that’s still quite impressive.
ESPN’s new standalone streamer could really benefit from this deal
Disney announced earlier this month during its earnings call that it is planning to re-launch ESPN Plus with a new standalone ESPN streaming service that would effectively give you linear ESPN but without the cable subscription. ESPN Plus has struggled over the years because it doesn’t have as many rights to major sporting events for this service since it doesn’t include linear ESPN.
However, with this new deal for the CFP games, ESPN could really use this as a way to bolster signups and users for its new standalone streaming service since the agreement does include the ability to do streaming-only playoff games. It’s unlikely that the semifinals or the championship game would be streaming only. But the NFL and Peacock have shown that a streaming-only playoff game can work.
Peacock had the exclusive broadcast of the Kansas City Chiefs vs. Miami Dolphins in the wild-card round, which ended up being the most live-streamed event ever in the US. It averaged around 23 million viewers during the game. That’s not far off from the amount of people who watched the CFP National Championship in January.
The only downside here is that the ESPN standalone streaming service isn’t set to launch until 2025. This means all 11 games this year will be on linear TV, most likely unless Disney decides to sublicense a game to the new ESPN/Fox/Warner Bros Discovery mega sports streamer, which is launching this fall.
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