Announcement Made for Georgia Bulldogs and Florida Gators
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ATHENS - Kirby Smart and his Georgia Bulldogs know for sure when they will take on Billy Napier and the Florida Gators.
The Georgia Bulldogs will take on the Florida Gators on Saturday, October 29, 2022 in Jacksonville at 3:30 on CBS the network announced Wednesday. The move was not surprising, and was the latest in a long line of CBS selecting the game ahead of the season. Georgia, which is considered a 17-point favorite by Fan Duel over their rivals, beat the Gators 34-7 a season ago on the way to the 2021 College Football Playoff National Championship.
It is the second game time that has been announced for the Dawgs for 2022. Earlier this year, Disney announced that Georgia would take on Oregon at 3:30 on ABC.
Last season more than 6 million viewers watched the Bulldogs take out Dan Mullen and the Gators. The game, which has been known as the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, has been a staple of CBS’s contract with the SEC. Since 1996, only once in 2002, has the game not been played on CBS at 3:30.
But change is coming to the game in the future. Disney, not CBS, holds the rights for the SEC’s entire football package in a couple of seasons. And while Georgia-Florida has traditionally been held in the afternoon, there is no guarantee that will continue.
“I think everyone is making their preference known to our partners,” said one SEC insider. “But we are all only 1/16th of the league. If there is a shift in the time of the game because our broadcast pattern wants that… well, there will be a shift.”
One of the main reasons Disney was so eager to get the entire SEC football slate was for games like Georgia-Florida, Alabama-Auburn and others. The addition of Texas and Oklahoma to the league in a few years will only broaden the slate of games the outlet will have to place among its slew of outlets which includes ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU and the SEC Network.
Meanwhile, CBS selected the Penn State-Auburn game on September 17 and Arkansas-Missouri game on November 25th. The network confirmed that the SEC Championship Game will kick off at 4 PM on December 3. And it will use doubleheader weekends on October 8 at 3:30 and 8:00 and November 12th at Noon and 3:30.
CBS will almost certainly put the Alabama-Texas A&M game at 8 PM after the Nick Saban-Jimbo Fischer debates that took place earlier this month.