To me- this isn’t all that surprising. USA is in something like 86 million homes and NBCSN was in 82 million IIRC. NBC obviously has a great piece in college football with Notre Dame, but the lack of any other major contractual tie-ins for CFB/CBB is killer. You can’t make a living as a sports only channel in the US broadcasting hockey and marginally interesting Olympic sports while totally ignoring MLB/NBA/CFB/CBB.
I don’t know if the contract with ND requires NBC to ”exclusively“ hold ND games and no other CFB on NBC, but the fact that NBC never even appeared to be a serious bidder for SEC, Big Ten, PAC12, AAC, MWC and any other FBS conference rights was bizarre to me. They had solidified contracts with the Ivy League and A10.. assuming that has something to do with a conflict of interest from the ND deal.
The main reason FOX has been able to make FS1 work (and the reason FS2 still flounders) is they’ve finally acquired enough assets to truly put live sports in CFB, CBB, MLB, NFL on daily in multiple windows. They’ve secured rights to B1G, Big 12, PAC12, MWC for both football and basketball, in addition to Big East in CBB and the NFL on Sundays and MLB throughout the Spring/Summer. In addition to all of that, they spent a ton of money to get Cowherd back in the beginning of the FS1 days and have regularly overpaid to get personalities away from ESPN (hello Skip Bayless). The investment in pregame and postgame shows is great- the Big Noon Kickoff team with Urban Meyer was fantastic and a great alternative to College Gameday.
If NBC really wanted that channel to work, they would’ve needed to acquire at least 1 P5 league to put on NBC and NBCSN weekly and probably scooped the AAC last go round and maybe Sun Belt or CUSA type rights to split between Peacock/USA/NBCSN. It would require a billion (yes BILLION with a B) dollar effort to make that channel worth it in the long run. But they never really wanted to commit to it and quite frankly with the way things are headed, I can’t blame them.
