August was already slated to be a crazy month, with Fox Sports 1 debuting a ton of new programming, ESPN rescheduling its entire afternoon lineup and premiering a soccer show, and NBC starting its English Premier League package. Everyone on the sports media beat was already prepared for a ton of new changes. NBCSN is making sure that we have a couple more to note.
NBCSN will launch two new shows in August
In the midst of new programming pushes by ESPN and Fox, NBC gets in the game as well.
NBC Sports Group
Not to be outdone by all the new stuff at FS1 and ESPN, NBCSN will premiere two new sports shows in August, both in partnership with Yahoo! Sports. One is a bit of a no-brainer, and an add-on to the network’s already existing Pro Football Talk shows. The other ... well, we’ll get to it in a moment.
NBCSN will premiere Fantasy Football Live: Thursday Night! on Thursday, Aug. 1. The show will air every Thursday night at 6:30 p.m. ET. , as a lead-in to the first NFL game of each week. It will use, according to a press release, “unique metrics from Yahoo! Sports’ leading fantasy football platform, and full integration with NBC Sports’ premier fantasy sports information site, Rotoworld.com.”
Fantasy Football Live will be hosted by Pro Football Talk’s Erik Kuselias, with analysts Shaun King of NBC Sports as well as Brad Evans and Brandon Funston of Yahoo! (see what we’re getting at here?). The show will also feature a half-hour web companion, airing immediately after on both Yahoo! and the NBC Sports websites, and hosted by Melanie Collins.
The other show NBCSN is set to debut is a mid-day talk show called SportsDash with Yahoo! Sports. Airing weekdays from noon-1 p.m. ET, the show will “utilize an innovative digital media wall to aggregate and display fans’ sentiments and interest based around Yahoo! Sports Trends.” The show will be hosted by Carolyn Manno and Dave Briggs, whom you might remember as Michelle Beadle’s former co-host. SportsDash premieres Aug. 19, the same day Fox Sports 1 starts rolling out its regular weekday programming.
That means that between Fox Sports 1, NBCSN and ESPN, there will be approximately 12 hours per day of sports talk shows. That counts in shows that are dedicated to a single sport (e.g. NFL Live, Fox Football Daily) but still ... it’ll be interesting to see what survives, and what it says about us as a nation should all of the shows survive.
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