This could be the Black Friday finale for Mizzou-Arkansas’ national TV game: Media Views

But the annual tussle has been a day-after-Thanksgiving staple on the CBS television schedule for nearly a decade, a run that ends Friday as Disney-owned networks will take over the entire Southeastern Conference football TV package next season that currently are shared.

Nick Dawson, senior vice president of college sports programming and acquisitions for those Disney outlets, told the Post-Dispatch that a determination has not been made yet for next season’s Black Friday television schedule.

“Once the conference determines all the dates, we’ll have conversations with them to figure out what might make sense for Thanksgiving night as well as Black Friday,” he said.

Missouri and Arkansas will have more competition for that Black Friday showcase spot in the future because two high-profile programs, Texas and Oklahoma, enter the SEC next season.

“The intent is that there’ll be a game involving SEC schools on Black Friday,” Dawson said. “… There will be a bunch of good inventory.”

There will be several significant developments for TV viewers other than a possible new Black Friday schedule when Disney takes the entire package and divvies up games between ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, SEC Network and ESPNU to kick off of a 10-year deal worth a reported $300 million annually. (CBS currently is at $55 million).

The primary slots for games will be at 11 a.m., 2:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.

CBS has shown the feature SEC game at 2:30 p.m. most weeks for years, and Dawson said marquee matchups will continue to be carried at the same time and over the air — on ABC (KDNL, Channel 30 locally). But they will not necessarily be the top contest.

“It should be one of the two best games, at least on paper, each week,” he said. “There will be times we shift the feature game to ABC in prime time. We’d have an SEC game on ABC (at 2:30), it might just be the second game, or ‘A-’ game.”

He added that there might not be an ABC prime-time SEC telecast every week.

“It depends on how the schedule lays out and how the season plays out week to week,” he said. “We certainly expect there will be a big SEC presence in the ABC prime-time window.”

Dawson said there also could be weeks when there is an SEC tripleheader on ABC.

“It’s somewhat up to our discretion week to week,” he said. “More often than not, I would suggest there would be a couple games on ABC. But it’s certainly not a hard obligation.

“The goal at least in our mind — we still have to wait and see the actual schedule from the conference once they finalize the dates — is to hopefully position ourselves to where there’s a high-quality SEC game on ABC or ESPN” at 11 a.m., 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. “So if you’re an SEC fan, you have a choice to watch hopefully one of the three best games in the league on that given day in each of those slots. Of course, SEC Network would have a full slate of games hopefully each Saturday as well.”

Under the current setup, the starting times of many SEC games are not announced until a relatively short period beforehand. But Dawson said that beginning next year there often will be much more advanced notice, with the full schedule of 11 a.m. contests to be set no later than midsummer.

“Those games all will be predetermined prior to the start of the season,” he said. “They won’t be able to be moved. Beyond that, we have some flexibility once you get past the first three weeks to tag a certain number of games each week.”

Those “tagged” games can be shifted from 2:30 to 6:30 or vice versa, but each team will have a limit on the number of times it can be moved. Dawson said that figure has not been set but estimated it will be about five.

“A lot more of the games will have a defined window time or a limited number of options assigned to them by June 15 each year,” he said. “It should be a good thing for fans as they plan their Saturdays for travel. This hopefully will define as much as possible for fans but also give us enough flexibility to react to wins and losses and storylines that develop throughout the year.”

It will be like assembling a jigsaw schedule in putting the TV schedule together what with the current CBS games added to the Disney mix.

“From a volume perspective, it will increase, and we’ll work SEC in context with our programming commitments around the ACC, Big 12, American on down the list with the conference partners we have,” Dawson said. “We’re lucky we have a bunch of great platforms to house all of it and we’ll do our best to make it as fan friendly and user friendly as possible.”

CBS (KMOV, Channel 4 locally) is down to the wire with its SEC telecasts. After the MU-Arkansas matchup, it only has Saturday’s Alabama-Auburn contest and the SEC title game (Alabama-Georgia) the following week.

The Tigers and Razorbacks get the spotlight Friday in the finale of what will be nine meetings that CBS will have shown. The first drew the biggest audience nationally, 4.4 million. The figure dipped to 1.8 million at its low point, in 2018, but has increased each time since and was at nearly 3.3 million last year.

Locally, the game has done very well in the ratings, with five of the eight matchups having been seen by more than 100,000 viewers — including 151,000 last year, the most since 202,000 watched the series debut in 2014.

This year, Missouri has played in the marquee CBS slot in two of its last three contests — after a nearly five-year absence — and drew outstanding ratings in St. Louis. The contest against Georgia was seen in 10.8% of the market, then the matchup with Tennessee jumped to 11.1%. That’s according to Nielsen, which tracks viewership. Then last week, Mizzou was on ESPN for its scintillating come-from-behind 33-31 victory over Florida, and 9% of the market tuned in for that one. In contrast, the highest-rated Cardinals game the entire baseball season was 10.6, and their local telecasts averaged 5.6.

With MU wrapping up a big season on Friday, KMOV general manager JD Sosnoff is expecting another large TV audience.

“The last three Saturdays, two on CBS and one of them on ESPN, they were the highest-rated programs on (St. Louis) television during the whole day,” he said. “Mizzou football. I think we’re going to do a really strong number on Friday.”

CBS will have its lead broadcast team, fronted by play-by-play announcer Brad Nessler, analyst Gary Danielson and reporter Jenny Dell, at the Alabama-Auburn contest Saturday. So it has assigned Rich Waltz (play-by-play), Aaron Taylor (analysis) and Amanda Guerra (reporter) to call the Tigers-Razorbacks game. That’s the crew that had the MU-Georgia game on Nov. 4.

Friday’s contest will have some new competition for viewers this year, as the NFL is playing a game on Black Friday for the first time. It will be an Amazon streaming production of the New York Jets entertaining the Miami Dolphins. That is to kick off at 2 p.m. (St. Louis time), an hour before Mizzou and Arkansas start battling.

That will be a bittersweet sendoff for Mizzou on KMOV, which didn’t get a lot of games in recent years when the Tigers weren’t strong and often were relegated to lesser outlets. But Channel 4 will finish with three of MU’s final four regular-season contests.

“It’s been great to have them on this year with as many games as we’ll have,” Sosnnoff said. “It’s been fun to capture the excitement in the area — to see that again, that’s been missing for a while.”

Bally Sports Midwest is offering a discount for three months of its direct-to-consumer streaming product, Bally Sports+. That includes all the Blues hockey and St. Louis University basketball games it shows, as well as some contests of the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies and Indiana Pacers. Access to the package through most of February is being sold for $33, a 45% discount from the regular price of $60. The company says the offer runs through Monday, is good for new and returning customers, and only can be bought at the offers.ballysports.com website.