Watch out: The sun might interfere with your football game this week

Seasoned sports fans usually know which side of the stadium to sit on to avoid staring directly into the sun for an entire game.

But this week, there may be no avoiding Mother Nature’s whims, even if you choose to watch the game at home. It’s October, and that means its satellite interference season.

Reminder: it’s sun outage week. The sun will be directly behind geostationary satellites, which will cause some interference on Saturday.

This happens twice a year, and for our purposes, it usually happens during or around Red River. pic.twitter.com/yyJIZV5est

— Sickos Committee (@SickosCommittee) October 10, 2024

Yes, that’s right. The literal sun could screw up your ability to watch the game. We’ve already seen some level of interference that could have been sun-related earlier this week during a TBS broadcast of the ALDS. Last year around this time, there were some rather high-profile incidents, including during a fake punt in the Red River Rivalry (though ESPN said this was a power issue with one of its on-site generators).

Happy Disney sun outage day, everyone pic.twitter.com/mqjemVbYrQ

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) October 7, 2023

The phenomenon occurs when the Earth and satellites used to transmit television signals are directly lined up with the sun. When this happens, the sun’s radio frequencies can disrupt the signal between the satellites and satellite receivers on Earth.

Now the networks are almost assuredly aware of this, but college football in particular poses a unique challenge. While networks may be able to set up certain backups, redundancies, or alternative means of transmission for the biggest games of the week, there are simply too many college football games on a given Saturday to have the resources to do this for every game.

Many low-wattage games every week rely on satellite trucks at the game site to transmit feeds back to a remote production center where the game is actually directed and produced. If the satellite feed gets interrupted, you may well be SOL.

Now this is all speculative (I’m no astronomy major), but those in the know seem to acknowledge this happens pretty regularly around this time of year. Perhaps this year is different, but if it’s not, now you’ll know why.