Inside ESPN’s Playbook For The Expanded College Football Playoff

Blimps, drones and more McAfee will give the big games a big game feel–and draw big ratings.

The new expanded 12-team College Football Playoff is going to be a big deal and ESPN is making sure it looks like one to college football fans.

The Walt Disney Co.-owned sports giant will be pulling out all the stops, with more drones, skycams, shoulder programming, multicasts, Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit and Pat McAfee to make sure that the millions of viewers expected to tune in stick around to see if one of the top-ranked teams wins the No. 1 ranking, or if Cinderella gets crowned.

“Obviously, everything’s different,” said Nick Dawson, senior VP of programming at ESPN. “You go from a four-team structure to a 12-team structure, three games up to 11 games, new weekends, new rounds, on-campus games versus traditional bowl sites. So for us, there is so much new here that we feel is exciting for us to showcase and produce for fans.”

The new playoff system seemed to make the regular college football season more exciting, with more games having an impact on a larger number of teams trying to get into the playoff. The total average audience for college football was up 6% this season, according to iSpot.tv.

“We want to do the best job we can at maximizing this first shot at it,” Dawson said. “We’re going to be great note-takers as well in terms of making sure that we learn through the process and can tweak and make adjustments as necessary as we move ahead to Year 2 and beyond.”

ESPN agreed to pay $1.3 billion a year for the rights to the College Football Playoff as part of a six-year deal announced in March. A year ago for the four team playoff, ESPN registered revenue of $110 million for the semifinal games (the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl) and the National Championship game. 

This year, Disney Ad Sales says revenue is up by high-double digits and sources familiar with the situation said that prices for 30-second commercials in the championship game have sold for between $1.4 million and $2 million, up from about $1 million to $1.1 million a year ago.

In addition to the new playoff structure, college football got a boost from the growth of the biggest conferences. The SEC and the Big Ten accounted for 63% of all college football TV viewing this season. The SEC’s share grew to 37% from 24%, while the Big Ten increased its share to 26% from 20%.

While David vs. Goliath is often a popular narrative, this season’s playoffs will benefit from having many of the most popular teams in college football in the bracket. Only Indiana, Arizona State, SMU and Boise State were outside the 25 most watched schools during the regular season, according to iSpot.

To amp up excitement about the playoffs, ESPN’s top team of Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit will be working more postseason games, said Amanda Gifford, VP production at ESPN. In past years, they called the Rose Bowl and the championship game. This year, they’ll call a game in each round of the playoffs.

All of the games will have the bells and whistles usually associated with a top game: extra cameras, drones, blimps and virtual graphics.

Because first-round games are being played on the home teams’ campuses, some on-site planning couldn’t be done until the conference championship was played and the final playoff brackets were set.

“The on-campus games are going to be awesome,” Gifford said. “Everybody’s super excited and very accommodating, but it is an added wrinkle to bowl season that we haven’t had to deal with before.”

One of the games is going to be at Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend, Indiana, where ESPN hasn’t broadcast a game for decades.

ESPN announcer Sean McDonough was particularly excited about potentially doing a game from South Bend. “I was softly preparing him because I wasn’t sure it was going to work out for him. We knew Notre Dame would be in the playoff, but we didn’t know where or when they’d play,” Gifford said. “When it came to fruition, he said ‘This is bucket list. I can’t wait to do it.’ And that’s how everybody feels.”

ESPN’s research shows that many fans are confused about the new 12-team college playoff system, with questions about how it starts and how seeds are decided.

“So we really made it a priority across studio and event production throughout the fall to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to educate people. Instead of describing it as an expanded playoff, we keep saying 12-team playoffs. It’s just another subtle way to remind people of how many teams are in the playoffs this year,” Gifford said. 

There will also be a lot of discussion about who the less-well-known teams are and who they are, as well as where they sit in the bracket, who they’ll play next, and when. That will be done by the announcers as well as with graphics. 

“We've got some really great team brands in this postseason, which is fantastic. But then you've got the Boise States, Arizona States, the SMUs and for a lot of people this is the first time that they are going to be watching these teams,” she said. “So it's really a priority of ours on the production side, to make sure that people can tune in and immediately have an understanding of the players they need to know and how they got here.”

Pat MacAfee will be on the sidelines with a McAfee Field Pass during each round and there will be a variety of special alternative telecasts on various ESPN network and platforms, including a Command Center feed, a Skycast feed, an ESPN Deportes feed in Spanish as well as fees featuring half-time bands, hometown radio calls, an All-22 with ESPN radio and 4K productions.

In addition to the Disney networks, some of the playoff games ESPN produces will appear on Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNT, TBS and truTV cable channels and Max streaming service. That requires a new layer of cooperation.

“There will probably be comparisons to Inside the NBA,” Gifford said, noting that TNT Sports will be producing the basketball studio show, which will air on ESPN next season. 

“This is completely different in that we control the talent and the production,” she said. The two companies have worked closely to ensure that while the games appear on different networks, to viewers they should all look like part of the same college football event. Thanks to the work of ESPN’s creative services department, graphics on the different networks will look the same, with the same color tones and similar-looking anchor desks. The key exception will be the network logos. 

TNT will have its own pre-game shows opposite ESPN, which will have the popular College GameDay. 

“We’ve coordinated with them in different ways we can synergize,” Gifford said. “Our in-game talent will appear on their pregame show and we’ll be sharing cameras and overhead coverage and arrival footage and things like that,” she said. “They’ve been great. We’ve been working really well together to make sure that both of us get what we need and ultimately serve the consumer who’s going to be watching these games.”

ESPN will be amplifying the College Football Playoff with programming on ESPN and the SEC and the ACC Networks. In addition to SportsCenter and other studio programming, ESPN+ will be running five episodes of its series Inside the College Football Playoff, a behind the scenes look as the teams prepare to play with commentary from Paul Finebaum, Rece Davis, Tim Tebow, Laura Rutledge, Booger McFarland, Heather Dinich, Greg McElroy, and Roman Harper. There will be a new edition between each round. Content from the show will be clipped and repurposed across the ESPN platforms.

“I think this is the first time you have a chance for the story to develop and play out throughout the tournament, almost like you see during March Madness, where a team can pull an upset, go on a streak and win consecutive games,” Dawson said. “The old format didn’t really give that a chance to exist. Now it does.”

And don’t forget, on top of the College Football Playoff games, ESPN has another 30 or so bowl games to produce and televise. 

What scenario are the ESPN execs hoping for: a popular team to go all the way or a dark horse to push into the final? 

“Here’s what I root for: I root for close games that come down to last-second field goals,” said Gifford. “I have one favorite time, other than that I root for the teams that are going to give me the best storylines and create the most chaos.”

“You’re not going to like this answer, but I don’t think you can go wrong here either way,” added Dawson.