Fox Sports to broadcast college football game every Friday on network: Source

Fox Sports will feature a Friday prime-time college football game on its broadcast network each week beginning this season, the network is set to announce, a source with direct knowledge of the network’s plans told The Athletic.

The games will emanate from the Big Ten, Big 12 and the Mountain West. The first matchup is still to be determined because the television schedule, coordinated with the other networks, does not take place until May. The move further concentrates the network around football with Friday night and Saturday centered on the college game and Sunday featuring the NFL.

Fox still intends to showcase its biggest game of the week Saturday during its “Big Noon Kickoff” spotlight.

The regular Friday night games were largely anticipated after Fox did not renew the rights for WWE’s Friday Night Smackdown. Fox Sports executives believe the college game will produce higher ratings than WWE.

WWE, though, is 52 weeks of the year, while college football extends for a little more than three months.

Fox’s goal is to have the No. 1 college football game on Fridays and Saturdays and then the top-rated NFL contests on Sunday afternoons, the network’s president of insight and analytics Michael Mulvihill said. The extension of college football into a regular Friday prime-time broadcast means that in the fall, the top NFL and college games will be featured every night of the week except Tuesday and Wednesday.

For parts of the fall, ESPN has televised MAC games during the middle of the week.

The late afternoon NFL Sunday window, which rotates between Fox and CBS, is generally the highest rated of the weekend.

Required reading

(Photo: Robin Alam / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)