OT: The truth about TV timeouts, plus the state of CFB TV with Bob Thompson
Split Zone Duo: College Football Podcast
Richard Johnson and Alex Kirshner
4.9 • 916 Ratings
🗓️ 26 September 2024
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are TV timeouts really longer this year? The answer has two parts. SZD obtained years of documents outlining how media timeouts work in SEC games on ESPN. There’s been no short-term change. (That LSU-South Carolina game was just a weird one, our analysis shows.) But the long-term trend tells its own story about viewers losing more and more of their time to in-game advertising.
Then, to help us parse what we’ve learned, we welcome a guest: Bob Thompson, a sports media consultant and the former president of the Fox Sports Networks. Bob talks with Richard and Alex about the forces shaping our viewing experience, whether there’s any way to lighten the commercial load in a world of ever-growing rights fees, and if the Pac-12’s fight with the Mountain West will wind up worthwhile for Washington State, Oregon State, and their friends.
Producer: Anthony Vito
ALSO THIS WEEK AT SPLIT ZONE DUO
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We're coming and we ain't back in now. We don't need a bunch of cats in here. |
| 0:04.0 | Looking in the mirror. |
| 0:05.0 | Everybody do you do your job. |
| 0:07.0 | You have to stay there. |
| 0:08.0 | Hey, will you shut up? |
| 0:09.0 | I'm bitterly disappointed with the officiating today. |
| 0:11.0 | Guys being dudes. |
| 0:12.0 | And they run through our shit, like shit through a ten horn man. with the |
| 0:15.0 | important guy's being dudes and they run through our shit like through a ten horn man |
| 0:16.0 | thank you Lee in week three the first big SEC game of the new SEC on ABC setup with Disney. |
| 0:25.2 | LSU in South Carolina needed three hours and 59 minutes to finish the game. |
| 0:30.7 | Watching live compared to the other games in that early window that day it felt |
| 0:34.5 | interminable. I thought as many others did that we as consumers were getting |
| 0:40.4 | squeezed in this new TV deal between the best conference of college |
| 0:43.7 | football and the biggest media player in college football. Clearly the TV |
| 0:48.5 | timeouts were getting longer or more plentiful or something and these games were going to be slogs and the product was being diluted. |
| 0:55.8 | I also felt this way watching a number of other games this year in those island windows |
| 0:59.6 | where you're watching maybe on a week night or in week zero where it just felt like the game |
| 1:03.8 | that you were focusing on had endless commercial breaks that were taking a |
| 1:07.4 | long time and really ruining the pace of the game. Have you guys felt this way? |
| 1:10.5 | I have felt as I have expoused on this podcast multiple times, |
| 1:17.0 | it ain't the commercials that are ruining the pace of college football games. |
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