College Football on CBS Sports
CBS first televised regular season college football games in 1950, airing them on a weekly basis during periods in the 1950s and 1960s.
Desmond served as play-by-play commentator for CBS's 4 broadcasts in 1951, including the first ever color telecast when #5 California played #19 Penn.
CBS used Joe Hasel, Bob Neal, Mal Stevens, Jack Drees, Francis Wallace, Tom Harmon, and Gil Stratton as commentators.
Lindsey Nelson, Jim Simpson and former Notre Dame head coach Terry Brennan were the lead broadcasters.
CBS broadcast games from every major conference, as well as the games of the then major independents such as Penn State (now a Big Ten member), Notre Dame (a temporary Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) member in 2020 only) and Miami (now in the ACC).
This allowed the network with priority on a particular date to have first choice when selecting the game it wished to air and whether it wanted the 12:00 ET or 3:30 ET timeslot.
As required by the NCAA, the network also televised Division I-AA, II and III games to very small audiences, giving teams such as The Citadel and Clarion State some television exposure (during the 1982 season, because of a player strike in the National Football League, these Division III contests aired nationwide).
Gary Bender was the lead play-by-play announcer for game coverage, working with analysts such as Pat Haden and Steve Davis.
Other CBS game commentators were Verne Lundquist, Lindsey Nelson, Frank Herzog, Jack Snow and Dennis Franklin.
CBS also used their regular NFL crews (Pat Summerall and John Madden at Wittenberg–Baldwin–Wallace, Tom Brookshier and Wayne Walker at West Georgia–Millsaps, Tim Ryan and Johnny Morris at Wisconsin–Oshkosh – Wisconsin–Stout, and Dick Stockton and Roger Staubach at San Diego–Occidental) and aired The NFL Today instead of using their regular college football broadcasters.
However, according to Sports Illustrated, fellow NCAA football rights holders ABC and WTBS refused to sign off on the idea.
When the red tape made showing big time college football too difficult to pull off, CBS got the idea to run Division III games on that Sunday.
It doesn't appear that CBS had plans to air any more games, however, since, Division III or not, it would have likely meant having to kick more money to the NCAA per ABC's and WTBS' demands.
In 1984, after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the NCAA contract in NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Georgia, the College Football Association was formed to handle affairs between television networks and college football programs, the result was an exclusive contract with ABC that granted the network rights to all CFA partner conference games and the games of most major independents.
Verne Lundquist, Tim Brant, Dick Stockton, Steve Zabriskie and Brad Nessler also called games for CBS during the CFA period.
After 1990, ABC obtained exclusive network coverage of regular season college football, as it won back the CFA and retained the Pac-10/Big Ten rights.
The coverage was originally branded "College Football on CBS", sponsored initially by NASDAQ, a tag it retains for non-SEC games broadcast on the network.
As part of the contract signed in 1996, CBS succeeded ABC Sports as the television home of the Army-Navy Game.
On September 26, 1998, CBS planned to show UCLA @ Miami at noon, but this game was postponed due to Hurricane Georges.
Sean McDonough and Terry Donahue were the scheduled announcer; the game was rescheduled to the end of the regular season.
On December 20, 2019, it was reported by Sports Business Journal that after having offered $300 million per-season, CBS had exited negotiations to renew its SEC package beyond the 2023 season.
[13][14] On December 10, 2020, ESPN announced that it had acquired the top SEC rights under a 10-year deal beginning in 2024, valued at $3 billion over the length of the contract.
The games are slated to air on ABC, thus centralizing the entirety of the SEC's media rights with The Walt Disney Company.
[17][18][19][20] On August 18, 2022, CBS reached a seven-year deal to broadcast Big Ten football and basketball beginning in the 2023 season.
[19][21] In 2023, CBS Sports Network began airing football games from the FCS level Northeast Conference.
[23] The instrumental theme music for CBS's college football broadcasts was written by New York composer Lloyd Landesman, and has been used since the 1987 season.
[1][24] In August 2022, news of CBS's intention to continue using the theme music for its Big Ten games spawned outbursts from upset SEC fans on Twitter.
The first pick of games between its three broadcast rightsholders (Fox, CBS, and NBC) is determined via draft selections of specific dates and other factors.
