We've got a doozy of an FCS national championship game on Sunday. On one sideline, South Dakota State, the No. 1 overall seed, believing this is the year they cash in after six straight top-10 seasons and five semifinal berths in the last six seasons. On the other, the green-and-gold King Kong of FCS football, North Dakota State, looking to win its 10th national championship in 12 seasons. When you add in that it's a rivalry game and that the "underdog" SDSU has won three straight games is looking to win one on the biggest stage, it's quite possibly the biggest an FCS game can be.
Hold up.
On Sunday???
Yes, the FCS National Championship will be played on Sunday.
As always, blame the NFL.
The NFL has two regular season games on Saturday, both on ABC and ESPN. Coverage of those games begins at 2:30 p.m. ET, which means the FCS game would have to kick at 11 a.m. ET to avoid ESPN competing with itself.
ESPN airs an NBA double-header on Friday night, and didn't want to compete with itself there, either.
Like all things FCS, the folks in Fargo were on to this well before the rest of us. Here's ESPN executive Dan Margulis speaking to the ABC affiliate in Fargo back in September.
ESPN's Dan Margulis, who is the director of programming joined @HotMicWDAY this morning and said this on why the FCS Championship Game was moved to Sunday on ABC: pic.twitter.com/CGF2VaPuzE
— Dom Izzo (@DomIzzoWDAY) September 9, 2022
"Being up against the NFL is what it is. College football fans will find it and it will do fine." Margulis said.
"If the game was on Saturday, you would go against the NFL. FCS games go long and we start pregame coverage for the NFL at 2:30 central time on ESPN and ABC. We would be scheduling ourselves into a nightmare."
If I were in charge of programming at ESPN, I'd put the FCS title game on ABC on Friday night. Then again, there are likely officials at both schools happy to give their fans Saturday to drive down Interstate 35 and Sunday night to drive back.
Plenty of college football fans would say Screw it all and play an FCS/FBS national championship double-header on Saturday afternoon and night on ESPN2. Of course, newly-returned Disney CEO Bob Iger would travel from Burbank to Bristol and personally strangle every single ESPN executive himself if they allowed that. Any college fan who doesn't acknowledge true, non-exaggerated fact isn't living in reality.
A few points:
1) With the expanded NFL schedule (17 regular season weeks to 18; four Wild Card games to six, including a Monday Nighter) there is no perfect time to play FBS and FCS postseason games.
2) The NFL, ESPN (and the other networks) will do what's best for themselves first, second and third, and what's best for college football fourth.
3) It's exceedingly weird that ESPN places the FCS National Championship on ABC in order to attract the widest possible audience, but FBS's biggest games are on ESPN. See Point 2: Getting the CFP and New Year's Six games allows ESPN to demand a higher fee from cable, satellite and streaming operators; marketing FBS football to the widest possible audience is a secondary concern.
4) Moving forward, FBS and FCS will have two choices: they can play their most important games on December and January Saturdays and compete head-to-head with the NFL, or they can ask their fans to show up and tune in on a weeknight.
There is no third option.