College basketball’s Feast Week has long been a major part of bringing attention to the sport early in the season. But thanks to new network real estate and a pair of high-profile matchups, Thanksgiving could bring more eyeballs than ever.
Both Fox and CBS will air matchups featuring some of the biggest brands following their NFL games Thursday. Fox has the 4 p.m. ET tip between Michigan State and North Carolina after the Lions vs. Packers game, while CBS has an 8 p.m. ET game between Duke and Arkansas after Cowboys vs. Chiefs. Those two games are expected to be the two highest-rated games of the regular season based on the track record of similar games in recent years.
The two most viewed regular-season college basketball games since 2008 have been Thanksgiving Day games with an NFL lead-in. The 2023 Michigan State vs. Arizona game on Fox averaged 5.2 million viewers following the Lions-Packers game, and last year’s Arkansas-Illinois game on CBS that followed Lions-Bears in that same window had 5.1 million viewers.
Those eye-popping numbers have both networks attempting to get in on the action this year. Derek Crocker, Fox’s senior vice president of college sports, says the network knew it wanted to have Michigan State involved given the natural overlap with the Lions. It got to work soon after the 2023 game to lock in the Spartans for a game the next time Fox had rights to the Lions on Thanksgiving.
“It was, ‘What’s the best matchup [for Michigan State] that we could potentially put in that window?’,” Crocker says.
The eventual solution came in the form of a multiteam event, which Michigan State needed for 2025 to fill its schedule. Event company Intersport, which operates more than 70 games per year including many of the top early season tournaments, had a place for them in the Fort Myers Tip-Off and leveraged its relationship with North Carolina (which plays in Intersport’s annual CBS Sports Classic) to get them on board as well.
“Networks started noticing Thanksgiving and Black Friday as good times to take Feast Week programming to network TV,” Intersport vice president of sports Mark Starsiak says. “We got together [with Fox and the schools] and got a destination, a broadcast window and business model that made sense for all of us.”
Intersport is also operating the prime-time Thanksgiving game on CBS, the showdown between Duke and Arkansas at the United Center. It has the potential to smash ratings records given its lead-in: The Cowboys’ Thanksgiving Day game is traditionally the highest-rated NFL game of the regular season, and the matchup with the Chiefs could give it an even bigger boost. Add in the college hoops brands involved, and it seems more likely than not that it will be the most watched college basketball game in recent history; a huge platform for Duke’s potential No. 1 NBA draft pick Cameron Boozer to introduce himself to the sports world.
“CBS Sports has long been synonymous with college basketball, and we are always looking for opportunities to showcase the sport at its best on a national stage,” Dan Weinberg, CBS Sports executive vice president of programming said in a statement to Sports Illustrated. “We’re thrilled to once again feature two premier programs in a high-impact window on Thanksgiving—when millions across the country come together and watch live sports—to tip off our regular-season schedule on CBS and start our run to March.”
These massive Thanksgiving games are part of a changing landscape for early season scheduling. Everyone from coaches to TV partners are getting away from traditional tournament-style events. Instead, there are more set schedules with marquee neutral-site games that give teams more scheduling clarity and networks more certainty about the types of games they’re carrying. Take the Fort Myers Tip-Off, which used to be a more traditional bracketed four-team event but now has set matchups with both North Carolina and Michigan State playing a mid-major foe on Tuesday before facing off Thursday.
“I don’t think you can just throw any two teams on Thanksgiving Day on CBS, what would be a championship game of a four- or eight-team event,” Starsiak says. “You kind of have to more purposefully make the matchup and make sure it happens.”
That may come at the expense of popular events like the Maui Invitational, which has its worst field in years this season as teams flock away from bracketed eight-team events. But it gives the sport a chance to stand out instead of conceding that eyeballs won’t truly shift to college hoops until after football season ends.
“[We’re] always trying to find unique windows for college basketball in a very crowded fall landscape where college football and the NFL dominate,” Crocker says. “Having the ability to utilize these types of windows shines a much brighter spotlight on the sport and helps create a little bit more buzz early in the season versus where we usually see the upticks post-NFL season.”
Crocker says he hopes Fox can get creative with college basketball following up the NFL in other slots as well, such as during wild-card weekend. In 2022, Fox aired a Christmas Day matchup between Creighton and DePaul that rated well following an NFL game, though Christmas is a bit harder to schedule around given most teams send players home for a couple of days around the holidays. Starsiak also points to what he calls a “massive opportunity” with nonconference games later in the season once football ends. Duke played Illinois at Madison Square Garden last season, and Intersport is putting on an Ohio State vs. Virginia game in Nashville this season as part of a handful of February nonconference games.
But Thanksgiving, a time that already holds a special place on the college basketball calendar, remains a massive window of opportunity, and Thursday’s likely record-breaking ratings will continue what has been a hot start to the season for the sport. Last week’s Illinois vs. Alabama game was the highest-rated nonconference college basketball game to ever air on FS1, while UConn vs. Arizona in the slot right before it was second all time. Meanwhile, ESPN’s Champions Classic posted its best numbers in three years in spite of a much-anticipated showdown between Kansas’s Darryn Peterson and Boozer not coming together due to Peterson’s hamstring injury. Once the Thanksgiving numbers get factored in, this will go down as one of the most watched Novembers in recent college hoops history.
“It’s hyper important for our sport,” Starsiak says. “To find time to showcase the best that the sport has to offer woven against football in the appropriate way, it hopefully can continue some momentum to get people paying attention to basketball before the end of February and March … the more oxygen and more real estate and ways we can show the best that we have to the biggest audiences will only help us continue to push forward.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Why Thanksgiving Is Becoming College Basketball’s Most Valuable TV Window.
