There’s going to be a first this week for Iowa State football: A Saturday night game on ABC with a nationwide audience. All it took was a plague and sidelining 40% of power-conference football teams to make it happen.
Now, there are some caveats for each part of this “first”, and I’m going to walk through them with help from this 2017 blog post.
- The every-game-televised era is around a decade old. For certain teams, it began September 1, 2007. For Iowa State, it didn’t start until a few years later.
- The first night game at then-Cyclone Stadium was October 20, 1984. Musco portable lights were brought in. The Cyclones lost to the Sooners 12-10. It was ESPN’s game of the week. Iowa State has not had a Saturday night regular-season game on ESPN since.
- The 2006 Nebraska game was a night game on ABC. It was the main game of the night, since the top broadcast team was in Ames. It was not shown to the entire country, as Oregon-Cal was given priority on the West Coast. The Cyclones lost to the Cornhuskers 28-14. Iowa State has not had a Saturday night game on ABC since.
- This also means I must make a correction to last year’s GameDay post. So noted!
- Iowa State has had two Saturday night games on Fox. The first was a 49-28 home loss to Baylor in 2014. The second was last year’s 42-41 loss to Oklahoma in Norman.
- The 2015 game at TCU, a 45-21 loss, was a night game on ESPN2.
- In a normal year, this time slot would be one of the two main contenders for “ESPN College GameDay”. But of course, this is not a normal year, and after the cascade of events in and following the 2019 Iowa game, it’s probably better this way. (Auburn-Georgia, the night game on ESPN, gets the fan-less version instead.)
In conclusion, this week’s game is the first nationwide on ABC on Saturday night, the second in ABC prime-time, the third on Saturday night on a network nationwide, the fourth on Saturday night on a network to a substantial part of the country, the fourth Saturday prime-time major-channel game in Ames, and the sixth Saturday night game in the ABC/Fox/ESPN/ESPN2 group. It’s the third of that group of games that involves Oklahoma.
The next prime-time network win, though, will be the first.