If ESPN wants to create a college football RedZone, Scott Hanson’s ready to talk.
The longtime NFL RedZone host has been making the rounds on various shows recently, and the topic keeps coming up. His answer remains consistent. He’d love to do it, but there are some obvious hurdles to clear first.
Hanson laid out his case on The Zach Gelb Show, explaining that his college football fandom runs as deep as his NFL knowledge. He watches about as much college football as professional football, setting up what he calls a “media wall” in his Los Angeles home with five monitors cycling through the best college games every Saturday.
“I would love to dip my toe into college football RedZone,” Hanson said. “I love college as much as every bit as I love pros. I played college football — that was as far as my football career could go.”
The appeal is obvious for Hanson, who already spends Saturdays consuming massive amounts of college football while preparing for NFL RedZone. He watches nine or ten hours of college football anyway, so talking about it while watching wouldn’t be much of a stretch.
“If the challenge was required and, obviously, if the deal was right to do it, I love serving the audience,” he said. “And if we could serve a college audience the way we developed an NFL audience through the RedZone style, oh man, it’s intoxicating, quite frankly.”
Hanson knows it’s not that simple. The biggest problem is that ESPN doesn’t own every college football game, unlike the NFL, which controls its product. College conferences have deals scattered across different networks, so ESPN couldn’t show highlights from a Fox Big Ten game or an NBC Notre Dame matchup.
“There’s some challenges to doing that because there is no NFL, even the NCAA isn’t the NFL when it comes to controlling the product, and where it’s distributed,” Hanson explained. “That is, if ESPN did college RedZone, they don’t have the rights to every single game exclusively.”
He’s outlined these same concerns in other appearances, including on The Rich Eisen Show, where he pointed out additional complications. College games don’t all kick off at synchronized times like NFL games do. The sheer number of teams creates accessibility issues for viewers. NFL fans can probably name most starting quarterbacks, but college football is much more fragmented.
“If your favorite team is the Alabama Crimson Tide, you probably know the Alabama Crimson Tide,” Hanson said. “But you can’t name me 30 other quarterbacks in college football. You might be able to name the rest of the SEC, maybe, or maybe some of the big opponents.”
The concept isn’t entirely far-fetched. ESPN previously operated something similar called ESPN Goal Line in the 2010s, though it shut down in 2020. The recent ESPN-NFL deal also gives Disney the RedZone branding rights, which theoretically opens the door for expansion into other sports.
A college football version would likely start small, maybe an SEC RedZone, since ESPN has exclusive rights to that conference. From there, it could potentially expand to include other conferences where ESPN has relationships.
For now, Hanson is content to keep throwing the idea out there whenever the topic comes up. He’s got the experience, the passion, and apparently the weekend availability. The only question is whether ESPN sees the same opportunity he does.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.