Fox Using Late-Season NFL Saturday Slate To Battle ESPN For Attention
While the entire NFL schedule remains a big deal for TV, inherently, there are certain time slots that bring on more audience excitement than others.
Among the regular rotation of games (non-holidays or international dates), Sunday Night Football on NBC remains the pinnacle, followed by Sunday afternoon games across CBS and Fox, then Monday Night Football on ESPN, and Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night slate. Then, below those are the late-season Saturday additions after the college football regular season wraps up.
However, that dynamic has been shifting in recent years.
In 2023, week 16’s Saturday games included bigger AFC matchups between teams like the Steelers, Bengals and Bills. Week 17’s Saturday contest was a primetime contest between the Cowboys and Lions.
Last season, Christmas matchups necessitated even bigger AFC games on the Saturday of Week 16, with the Chiefs and Texans facing off in the earlier window, followed by the Ravens and Steelers later. But week 17’s Saturday games were less exciting, NFL Network fare: A Chargers blowout over the hapless Patriots, a close Bengals/Broncos game and a low-scoring affair between the Rams and Cardinals with limited interest outside of the Southwest.
But this year, the NFL and Fox are seemingly making a major play for eyeballs with the announced late-season Saturday games — via Fox’s Upfronts pitch this week:
Eagles at Commanders and Packers at Bears are marquee games on the NFL schedule from an audience perspective, and at that point in the season, both could have enormous playoff implications. Matchups like that are typically reserved for either Sunday afternoons or primetime placements. So their placements here, as part of a Fox Saturday doubleheader, shows a shift in strategy for both the network and the league as a whole.
The bigger-than-usual Saturday games also serve as a way to effectively battle ESPN’s expanding College Football Playoff tentacles.
Last year’s 12-team playoff expansion had the sport encroaching into both mid-December and mid-January. And while TV ratings weren’t off the charts for those new first round (and quarterfinal) games, ESPN still enjoyed bigger audiences than it would’ve received from lesser bowl games or other, non-football programming.
Fox’s week 16 Saturday announcement tries to steal audience directly from those first round games in 2025, though. The two NFL matchups will appear on Fox opposite three of the four on-campus College Football Playoff games on ESPN.
Last year’s first round games, while more inclusive in the 12-team format, were also largely one-sided affairs — with two games (Penn State/SMU and Ohio State/Tennessee) featuring margins of 20-plus points. If football fans around the country have the option of tuning in for similar drubbings this year or a couple NFL rivalry games with playoff implications? Fox is betting they’re picking the NFL contests, and they’re likely right.
Now, we don’t know what the rest of the late-season Saturday schedule looks like, so there’s a chance that Fox’s Week 16 approach is a one-off occurrence. But Fox is earning an advantage here in its ongoing sports arms race with ESPN, thanks to the NFL’s recent aggressiveness toward its own would-be programming competitors.
While the NFL once ceded space to major college football games, Friday night high school football traditions, and even the NBA’s usual Christmas Day scheduling, all of those norms have recently fallen by the wayside as it further dominates television viewing.
You can’t necessarily blame the NFL. After all, it accounted for 72 of the 100 most-watched programs of 2024. But it’s still notable that the league is both willing to keep expanding its dominance, and is also happy to work with one TV partner (Fox) to battle another (Disney) for late-December viewer attention.
The reasoning behind it all, of course, is that it will work. Those NFL games will out-draw the college viewing options. And as a result, those big Saturday NFL matchups will become yet another successful carve-out that fans quickly get used to. Fox may not always be the beneficiary, mind you, as those Saturday games have rotated among partners. But as long as they get a few bites at the apple, it’s a no-risk bet for all parties.
