Why Fox COO Doesn’t Think They’ll Need a Backup Plan for 2020 College Football Season
Though the NCAA has yet to vote on its plan for the 2020 college football season amid the pandemic, Fox Corporation COO John Nallen doesn’t think that the media company will need to formulate a backup plan to fill a potential college-football-shaped hole in its programming this year.
“Look, I don’t think that’s the case,” Nallen said during the Credit Suisse 22nd Annual Virtual Communications Conference Tuesday, when asked what the “backup plan” would be for the company’s Fox broadcast network and cable channel FS1 if there was “no college football this year.”
“College football, the issue there is that there are just so many teams involved, so many universities involved, so many administrators that have to make decisions, not only about football, but about their own universities,” Nallen said. “When are they returning? How are they returning? And some of them have said if the kids don’t come back to school, they will not play football. So you may end up with certain conferences playing different schedules, maybe certain teams within a conference not playing because of the way their schools have decided to come back.”
*Also Read:* Fox to Raise $1.2 Billion After Saying Coronavirus May Have 'Material' Impact on Earnings
Last Thursday, the Division I Football Oversight Committee finalized a proposal for a preseason model for the 2020 college football season, one that would allow for the traditional season to begin on time. The NCAA will vote on that plan, which “assumes COVID-19 local and state health policies are considered at the institutional level,” on Wednesday.
“I think in the next month, mainly because you’ve got to get hundreds of thousands of kids moving around the country back to universities, there will be an announcement as to what the shape of the universities’ year will be, and therefore what the shape of the college football season will be like,” Nallen said Tuesday. “What we’re saying, what we’ve said before, is that whenever they’re ready to play, we’re ready to produce. The case in point was NASCAR. The pent-up demand for NASCAR was incredible. I think you saw it on golf this past weekend. The pent-up demand for that. We’re sold out of NASCAR, we’ve got no more units. People were just clamoring to get in there. So at the moment we’re just waiting and ready to produce.”
More to come…