FSU Football: Noles continues cable TV trend with early 2019 games

FSU football will again have the first quarter of their schedule be televised on cable television, a trend that has grown in numbers more in the past years.

While it may make us sound like old farts in the world, there was a time when the FSU football team was the spotlight franchise who had their games televised each week on one of the main national outlets – which, for the longest time, was having their games be televised nationally on either ABC, NBC or CBS.

The Seminoles continue to see their games televised nationally each week entering the 2019 season – but instead of it being on one of the four over-the-air networks broadcasting games, it instead is over on the Worldwide Leader (ESPN) or one of the outlets owned by that network.

The latest development in this case was announced on Thursday when FSU football found out that their season opener, an August 31st game against Boise State in Jacksonville, will be played under the lights and on national television – cable national television, that is.

When you add that to the two games that were released the days before – the next two games on the schedule against Louisiana Monroe and Virginia – are being broadcast by the brand new ESPN / ACC Network, the Seminoles will do something that seemed to be the growing trend in the program for a decade before.

Over a 10 season period from 2006 until 2015, the Seminoles started seven of the seasons with their first three games being on cable with just four of the 30 combined games over that period being on network television (2010 and 2011 vs. Oklahoma and 2014 against Oklahoma State and Clemson).

Now, we’ll give the Seminoles some credit in that – being they are one of the name teams in the ACC – the conference is going to want to highlight what they have as they debut the new network this season. Having FSU football kicking off both their home and conference schedules on the network was a must have for the ACC.

But, there is something to be missed about having the Seminoles play in the spotlight on one of the national networks. Some of it has to do with who they are playing, but other elements include the Noles attempting a bounce back season after the first losing campaign in over four decades.

Wherever FSU football is playing, they know fans not in attendance will find a way to watch it – they just didn’t know it would involve names like Comcast, DirecTV or others.