ESPN president discusses 'RedZone' possibility for college football, other sports

In between Week 3 and Week 4 of the 2025 college football season, ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro confirmed that the company is exploring a potential RedZone-style channel for the college game, copying off the NFL model which has been wildly successful.

Front Office Sports uploaded video of the EPSN president during a sit-down discussion where he was asked about the potential to create a RedZone for college football now that ESPN has control of the RedZone brand. Pitaro didn't confirm any steps toward building the channel just yet, but expressed that it's a possibility they'll explore.

“We are acquiring the RedZone brand, so we would have that opportunity," he explained. "We’ve started to think about how we could potentially expand it to other leagues but also other sports in general."

Now, that's interesting. Pitaro says the RedZone brand could be utilized for sports aside from football as well. The network already does something similar for the NCAA Baseball Tournament, called 'Squeeze Play,' which is objectively awesome if you are at all into baseball. Those other sports could be great RedZone candidates, and while the goal would be a channel like that for football, there are hurdles, Pitaro admits.

"College football is something that we started to look at," he added. “It’s a bit more complicated for obvious reasons than on the professional football side, but it’s definitely something that we’re considering, as well as other sports."

This is all contingent on the deal between ESPN and the NFL actually moving through the goalposts, Pitaro noted, but if so, a whole family of RedZone-style channels could be available for a great many college (or other) sports soon enough.

The big issues in the way of a college football RedZone are the sport's differences from the NFL in terms of how they distribute television rights. Since the NFL operates under one big umbrella and can fully control its rights deals and funnel them into a RedZone channel, ESPN only owns some of the TV rights in college football while each conference (and some teams) have their own television deals, making the tightrope toward a RedZone channel much trickier to walk.

You can read a little more about that issue right here:

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