If there were a relationship status between the SEC and CBS Sports, the official status would be “ It’s Complicated”. It will end a run that dates back to 1996 between the national network and one of the premier leagues in college athletics. CBS orchestrated a trade with ESPN to secure a second primetime window for that Alabama-LSU game.Īll of that will be part of history now as the SEC moves away from CBS after the SEC Championship Game in December. When November rolled around, Alabama was the top-ranked team in the nation and LSU was ranked second. The problem in 2011 was that CBS Sports had played that card the week of October 1st for Alabama at Florida. CBS is granted one primetime game per season, they build in a doubleheader with the first game in their standard 3:30 ET/2:30 CT window and the second game airing just after that in their primetime window. It is Alabama-LSU, though, that has been the CBS ratings winner over the years, none more than the 2011 “Game of the Century”, a 9-6 LSU win in Tuscaloosa that drew more than 20 million viewers the night of November 5th. The Cocktail party has been a standard 2:30 CBS kick since the conference games returned to CBS Sports in 1996. CBS showed that game for the first 16 consecutive years of thier contract with the SEC. The annual Gators-Vols tilt was a very early season SEC East elimination game and, by extension, a national championship elimination game. In fact, the only regular season games that have garnered as much CBS attention as Alabama-LSU are Tennessee-Florida and the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, Florida versus Georgia. It was the 11th primetime CBS telecast of an Alabama-LSU game, no SEC rivalry has been given a similar treatment under the current SEC on CBS run. That run came to a close Saturday night in Tuscaloosa as Alabama dominated in the second half to outlast the Bayou Bengals 42-28. Aside from the 2021 game in Baton Rouge - an overtime thriller on ESPN - CBS Sports has shown every Alabama-LSU game of the Nick Saban era. What followed was a 17-year run mostly filled with incredible regular season battles between the Tide and Tigers, all but one of those games CBS brought to the nation. The former head coach at LSU, a program he had resurrected, was now leading a team in the same division, a program that needed a resurrection. That was the day Nick Saban left the Miami Dolphins to become head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide. Life changed for CBS Sports on January 3, 2007, and they likely didn’t even realize to what degree.

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