San Jose State's Last ABC Appearance in 2006 Reflects a Different College Football Landscape

The Mountain West’s current media deal has allowed San Jose State to return to the over-the-air TV airwaves. For instance, in 2023, San Jose State appeared on CBS in the regular season for the first time in 41 years when they played Oregon State on Labor Day Eve. This came three years after an appearance on Fox in the 2020 Mountain West Championship. Still, an appearance on ABC eluded them.

That changes this Saturday when the Spartans travel to Austin to face the Texas Longhorns on ABC at noon Eastern Time. This is the Spartans’ first appearance since 2006, when ABC regionally aired their game against Nevada. The ABC appearance is a remarkable achievement for the program, but it also reflects a drastic change in the broadcasting landscape of college football.

It may seem strange to see ABC regionally televise a Western Athletic Conference game in 2006, and it was. On October 21, 2006, ABC aired a doubleheader to most of the country, at noon and 3:30 PM Eastern Time. Most of the country got the crucial Big 12 matchup between #5 Texas and #17 Nebraska at noon, with the #22 Boston College-Florida State and #2 Michigan-Iowa games splitting the 3:30 regional slate. Except there was a catch to the Nebraska-Texas game.

Because the game was at noon, viewers on the West Coast would miss it. Instead, they would get the San Jose State-Nevada game at 7 PM Eastern Time/4 PM Pacific to fulfill the doubleheader for that region. The coverage map linked here and shown below, archived courtesy HuskerMax.com, shows that the West Coast, around 18 percent of the country, received San Jose State-Nevada.

This 18 percent share of the country saw Nevada’s Robert Hubbard run for 161 yards and the Wolf Pack defense hold the Spartans to just 83 yards passing in a 23-7 win. Nonetheless, this did not make up for the 22-20 classic between Nebraska and Texas, where the Longhorns kicked a go-ahead field goal with 22 seconds to escape Lincoln.

It seems foreign, but this was a common practice for ABC. The prior year, ABC aired the USC-Oregon game at 7 PM ET/4 PM PT to the West Coast after most of the country received a noon ET doubleheader of Colorado-Miami and Iowa-Ohio State. San Jose State and Nevada also received the same treatment in 2005 after ABC aired Michigan State-Michigan and Texas-Missouri at noon ET. Arguably, the most infamous instance was ABC nearly blacking out # 1 Nebraska versus #3 Oklahoma on the West Coast for children’s programming.

This practice shows college football’s regionality. It is difficult to believe that a game featuring the #5 team in the country and the #17 team in the country, much less a clash between #1 and #3, would be blacked out on the West Coast, but that was common practice in those days. The regional nature of college football coverage gave overlooked programs such as Nevada and San Jose State moments in the limelight.

Now, the nationalized landscape virtually pushes conference narratives to regions that would otherwise be apathetic. While the SEC is king on ABC, many forget that it often shared regional slates with the Big East until 2000. The growing transcontinental nature of conferences does not help either. Conferences such as the ACC, Big Ten, and Big 12 stretch across vast expanses of land, making regional broadcasts a virtual misnomer.

Simply put, San Jose State’s last appearance on ABC seems like an eternity ago. The college football landscape, particularly in broadcasting, is unrecognizable in many aspects from 2006.

The incomparable mattsarzsports.com was indispensable to the production of this work. His college sports broadcast archives stretch back to 2005. Esteemed YouTuber JaguarGator8 made a video on the 2000 Oklahoma-Nebraska broadcast controversy, which you can watch here.