The first 12-team College Football Playoff is finally here.

More than two years after CFP expansion was green-lit for 2024, Notre Dame will host Indiana on Friday night in the first of four first-round Playoff games to officially kick off college football’s new postseason tournament.

Beyond being the first game in the CFP’s 12-team era, Friday night’s game is historic on several other fronts, too:

• Indiana–Notre Dame is the first CFP game played on a school’s campus, which is creating some unique logistical circumstances.
• ABC and ESPN, which are simulcasting the matchup, are becoming the first non-NBC networks since 1990 to broadcast a Fighting Irish home game.
• South Bend, Ind., is also hosting the first leg of what ESPN believes are the first back-to-back editions of College GameDay, which will be in Columbus on Saturday morning.

Fans in South Bend woke up Friday morning to a snow-covered Notre Dame Stadium, but weather forecasts don’t call for more snow ahead of kickoff at 8 p.m. ET.

High Drama and Big Business

The expanded CFP created dramatic off-field storylines all season long, and the 12-team bracket’s long-awaited reveal two weekends ago created some big business for all parties involved:

• The Big Ten topped all other conferences with four CFP bids (worth at least $20 million in guaranteed payouts), followed by three for the SEC ($16 million) and two for the ACC ($8 million).
• Controversy surrounded SMU’s entry and Alabama’s snub, while Boise State became the first Group of 5 school to reach the CFP, and two former Pac-12 schools earned first-round byes.
• Amid debate over the strength of schedules, the 12 CFP teams paid at least $26.9 million for regular-season matchups with Group of 5 and FCS teams.
• TNT Sports is set to broadcast its first CFP games, which will go head-to-head with two nationally televised NFL matchups.

After this weekend’s first-round games, the Playoff’s quarterfinals and semis will play out across the New Year’s Six bowls—college football’s most historic and traditional games. The CFP national championship game will take place in Atlanta on Jan. 20, which is the latest date the game has ever been played.

Netflix’s surprise deal for exclusive U.S. media rights to the 2027 and 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cups, announced Friday morning, marks yet another advancement of the streamer’s live sports strategy.

Pending any further expansion of the Women’s World Cup (which grew from 24 to 32 teams in 2023), Netflix will stream a total of 128 matches across the next two monthlong tournaments.

That’s new territory for the technology giant, which once suggested it was interested in only one-off, special-edition events.

This is the third major multiyear live sports deal in Netflix’s portfolio, which now includes:

• FIFA Women’s World Cup: 2027 and 2031 editions
• NFL: Three-year deal for Christmas Day games, starting next week
• WWE: 10-year, $5 billion deal for Raw, the promotion’s flagship weekly show, beginning in January

Of course, there was also last month’s Jake Paul–Mike Tyson fight, which Netflix claimed set a streaming record with an estimated average minute audience of 108 million live global viewers.

Lights, Camera, Action

The streamer’s first live sports event came in November 2023, when the The Netflix Cup paired PGA Tour stars from Full Swing with Formula One drivers from Drive to Survive. In March, Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz faced off in a special tennis match, The Netflix Slam.

When the NBA was negotiating its new set of media deals, Netflix reportedly explored acquiring the rights to the league’s in-season tournament, which has since been rebranded to the Emirates NBA Cup. 

Beyond live sports, Netflix continues to expand its sports docuseries portfolio. This week, it announced a new series around the SEC, and released a trailer for its Jerry Jones doc, America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys. The streamer also has series around the NBA and NFL, in addition to its F1 and PGA Tour shows, among others.

It looks like Fox will be making another attempt at broadcasting professional golf in 2025.

A source confirmed to Front Office Sports that the network is closing in on a media-rights deal with LIV Golf, which has been looking for a new U.S. TV partner after two seasons on The CW. Fox’s discussions with LIV were first reported by Sports Business Journal.

This would be Fox’s first golf deal since it opted out of its $1.1 billion USGA contract in 2020—just five years into the 12-year pact. Fox is still paying more than half of that annual $93 million rights fee for the U.S. Open and all other USGA events, while NBC, which now holds those rights, is paying the rest.

The final round of the last U.S. Open on Fox in 2019 averaged 7.31 million viewers in prime time from Pebble Beach. That was the network’s highest golf rating. Joe Buck led the golf coverage for Fox, which pushed boundaries as an early adopter of several now-staples of golf on TV like shot tracers.

Back in the late 1990s, Fox made a bid for PGA Tour rights that ultimately failed. Between 1996 and 2001, Fox had a roughly one-third equity stake in the Golf Channel, which simulcast early-round PGA Tour coverage on some Fox regional sports networks. 

Changing Clubs

The CW’s LIV deal was revenue-sharing only, but Fox will pay LIV a “modest rights fee,” according to Puck News, and both its main broadcast network and cable channels like FS1 and FS2. 

Sports agency CAA, which also works with the PGA Tour, has been helping LIV in its latest media-rights search. Another TV suitor that emerged along the way was TNT Sports, which broadcast this week’s “Crypto.com Showdown” featuring LIV’s Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka against the PGA Tour’s Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler.