ESPN Made One Big Change to Its College Football Broadcasts, and It Already Looks Incredible

The 2026 college football season is off and running. Last night we got to sit back and watch a stunning upset, with UMass beating Rutgers on the road for the program’s first victory in almost two years, and a thrilling finish, with Colorado beating Georgia Tech thanks to a blocked field goal as time expired.

When you fire up some games this weekend on ESPN, you might notice something a little different with the broadcasts—there won’t be a ticker at the bottom of your TV screen. Instead, you’ll just see the scorebug. This might sound like a little change to the viewing experience but you will quickly realize how much cleaner this looks and how you get about an inch added back to your screen.

Front Office Sports was the first to report this change by ESPN late last month. The ticker, which showed scoring updates and stats, will be gone from every game this year that airs on ABC, ACC Network, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPNews and the SEC Network.

“We’re always looking for ways to better serve sports fans,” an ESPN spokesperson said to FOS. “By removing the BottomLine during live action, we’re creating a cleaner presentation that keeps the focus where it belongs—on the field.”

Instead of providing constant updates at the bottom of the screen, ESPN’s broadcasts will periodically show scoring updates in a small box on the upper right of the screen. You’ll be alerted to the scores update by a short jingle, which might be a little jarring at first but should be easy to get used to.

Here’s how that looked during last week’s North Carolina-TCU game:

ESPN has gotten rid of the bottom line, but will still show games through "ESPN updates" in the top right during games. Here is what that looks like. pic.twitter.com/RB5afpAHfv
— Manny Soloway (@sportsontvguy) August 29, 2026

While at first I thought this change would be loved by everyone, I was surprised to see that a bunch of people on social media didn’t like it at all. This should be one of those rare things that brings everyone together, which is a very tough thing to accomplish these days. Most of the complaints were about not being able to see scores all the time and not knowing what to turn to during a commercial break.

To those people I ask two simple questions: Don’t you have a phone? Aren’t you looking at your phone every 20 seconds like just about every other person on the planet? The ticker is no longer necessary since we can fire up any score we want on said phones whenever we want. Getting a little bit of our TV screens back is a big win.

If you’re an older person, this might take you back in time to when NBC’s NFL broadcasts used to run a 10-minute ticker where they would flash scores up on the screen every 10 minutes. You’d get a quick feel for what was going on around the league and then you’d get back to being locked in on the game you were watching. Scores weren’t easy to find back then because our phones had cords and were up on the kitchen wall. Now we don’t have that problem, which makes this new setup so much easier and better.

I have to applaud ESPN for making this change. It’s always great when a company thinks about its customers and makes a move to improve their experience. That’s not something that happens too often, as we’ve all learned. So long, ticker. You won’t be missed!

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