Lets take a look at the first week games on Thursday in 2019
Thursday, August 29
6 p.m. — UCLA at Cincinnati, ESPN
6 p.m. — Florida A&M at UCF, CBS Sports Network
7 p.m. — Georgia Tech at Clemson, ACC Network
7:30 p.m. — Texas State at Texas A&M, SEC Network
8 p.m. — South Dakota State at Minnesota, Fox Sports 1
9 p.m. — Kent State at Arizona State, Pac-12 Network
9:15 p.m. — Utah at BYU, ESPN
Can we learn anything?
FoxSports1 had SDState at Minny at 8pm. Only Big Team playing.
No BTN games.
ESPN (along with their partner networks ACC, SEC) had no problem flooding games at different times. I suppose national champ Clemson (or were they runner up that previous year?).. are probably the equiv of OSU playing. 6PM start for UCLA at Cinci is 3pm in big LA market...
Yeah.. if both games are on FoxSports then, yeah, I can see an earlier start time for Rutgers as a lead-in.. and maybe an 8:20start for the OSU-Minny game.
But if the Rutgers game is on BTN and OSU-Minny on Fox.. then I think each network would make their own decisions for their own reasons and I'd expect some overlap.