SBJ College: McAfee helps ESPN beat Deion/Fox

My alma mater, Appalachian State, played North Carolina to a double-OT thriller before losing Saturday night. Their last three games, all sellouts, were decided on the final play. The regional matchups are good for college football, good for the institutions and good for the state. So, naturally, they’re not going to play anymore.

You go, college football.

McAfee alternate telecast pushes Texas-Bama past Coach Prime

Texas-Alabama led all college football games in Week 2, buoyed by a Pat McAfee-hosted alternate telecast on ESPN2, notes SBJ’s Austin Karp. But Deion Sanders and Colorado flexed their viewership muscle for a second straight week.

The matchup of future SEC rivals delivered a total of 8.76 million viewers in prime time across ESPN and ESPN2, marking ESPN’s best regular-season CFB game since 2015, when the cable net drew 10.59 million on Labor Day for Ohio State-Virginia Tech. The main feed on Saturday on ESPN drew 7.96 million, while McAfee’s feed on ESPN2 had 799,000. Texas-Alabama is also the best ESPN Saturday game since the Iron Bowl in 2014 drew 13.53 million viewers.Fox had the No. 2 college football game in Week 2 with Sanders’ home debut with Colorado against Nebraska. The game drew 8.73 million viewers in the “Big Noon Saturday” window, marking the best regular-season game yet for Fox involving a Pac-12 team. It’s also the 10th-best college football regular-season game yet for Fox. The audience tops the 7.26 million that Fox drew in the same window in Week 1 for Colorado-TCU.

Rounding out the top five college games in Week 2 were Texas A&M-Miami on ABC (4.02 million), Iowa-Iowa State on Fox (3.38 million) and Auburn-Cal on ESPN (2.23 million).

The CW also got started with its new slate of ACC games in Week 2, with Cincinnati-Pitt drawing 617,000 viewers on Saturday night. That easily beat the Saturday prime time average that the CW had last week (by 142%), and it was the broadcast channel's best Saturday night since it began broadcasting on Saturdays in October 2021. 

FishBait Solutions bringing new brands into CFP fold, with eye on experiential activation

FishBait Solutions has closed two significant CFP sponsorships in the last few weeks. The firm headed up by CEO Rob Temple and veteran marketer Rick Jones signed Shaw Sports Turf and Avocados From Mexico to official CFP deals, bringing new brands and categories into college football marketing.FishBait's innovative side has been on full display with this new CFP partnership, creating openings for brands that want the CFP affiliation but can’t afford the sponsorships that run in the low-eight figures annually. Those deals run through Disney Advertising and usually come with a healthy dose of ESPN advertising throughout most of the season.What FishBait is offering is a more affordable CFP option that’s not so media-heavy but still provides brands with activation opportunities right in the middle of the CFP’s footprint, such as the Playoff Fan Central festival. There will be other below-the-radar marketing opportunities, such as putting CFP marks on Shaw’s fleet of trucks that it uses to haul synthetic turf up and down interstates.

The way it works: Disney keeps exclusivity on the top 15 categories -- the major ones like soda, snacks, beer and fast food (not surprisingly, my brain goes straight to these categories). FishBait gets the rights to sell outside of those 15 categories. Deals at the second tier of sponsorship go for the mid-to-high six figures.

Bryan Blair has big plans for Toledo

Bryan Blair was the youngest AD in FBS when he was hired by Toledo at the age of 37. After 16 successful months, both competitively and academically, Blair set in motion last month a new strategic plan called “Rise Together.”

Strategic plans can be a little corny, but Blair, who joined the Rockets after several years working under Washington State AD Pat Chun, felt the time was right to put his goals on paper detailing his vision and purpose. Here are a couple of his thoughts from our conversation:

• “College athletics are changing more than ever right now, and because of that, it’s even more important to have these things in writing. It serves as a communication tool that aligns everyone around the same game plan. ... No different than a coach who scripts out his plays. It’s also an opportunity to give a lot of different people input. That input leads to shared buy-in for when the headwinds of college athletics shift under our feet.”

• “We asked our stakeholders three important questions: What is our value proposition? How do we deliver value? How can Toledo athletics help you? When you lead with wanting to help others, you wind up in a good place.”

• “When sports betting went legal in Ohio, I thought we may see an increase, but I’ve been blown away walking through a basketball game and seeing how many phones are on a sports betting app. That really struck me. I’ve gotten to where, when people ask me questions about a team or a game, I’m really closed-mouthed with my responses.”

You can hear my full conversation with Blair here.

• Spending game day with the Charlotte Sports Foundation's Danny Morrison meant thousands of steps before the Duke’s Mayo Classic teams even hit the playing field at Bank of America Stadium. My colleague Ben Portnoy wrote about the experience in SBJ this week. 

• Developed through a 50-50 joint venture between bet monitoring service US Integrity and regulatory consultant Odds On Compliance, a new product called ProhiBet is allowing conferences and universities to make encrypted, identifiable information -- for example, names, birth dates and Social Security numbers -- of players, coaches and employees available to sportsbooks so that they can be blocked from placing prohibited bets, notes SBJ's Bill King.