Welcome back to MoneyCall, The Athletic’s weekly sports business cheat sheet. (Get it conveniently in your email every Wednesday morning!)We’re going to dig into college football’s weird eligibility crisis of its own making, Good Good Golf’s bad bad decisions and the end of LIV 1.0. But we’ll start with something in the sports attention economy to feel actually good about.Name-dropped today: Nebraska volleyball, Lane Kiffin, Pat McAfee, Erling Haaland, Hull City, Kinley Rasmus, Jed York, Marc and Elisa Stad and more. I’m your host, Dan Shanoff. Let’s go:Driving the ConversationCollege volleyball’s tipping point?Previously, on MoneyCall: My daughter started playing club volleyball. Then earlier this month, she made her high school JV team. My Volleyball Dad journey continues, just in time …Last weekend, the new college women’s volleyball season started with a match on Fox, the first of an unprecedented eight matches airing nationally on the broadcast network this year.Tomorrow night on TNT: Florida, Penn State, SMU and the headliner, No. 1 Nebraska, will become the first women’s college volleyball teams to play on an NFL field, at AT&T Stadium outside Dallas. That comes as part of “Spikes Under The Lights,” a one-night, three-match, $1 million primetime showcase, with each team getting $200K for being there and the winner getting $200K more — unprecedented participation payouts for women’s college athletes.• Fox has more coming this weekend: Friday night is another doubleheader on broadcast TV, and Sunday afternoon holds arguably the biggest match of the season: Nebraska vs. No. 2 Texas in Las Vegas, 3:30 p.m. ET on Fox.• ESPN has its own massive slate this season: 2,400 matches, including more than 100 on ESPN linear networks and nearly two dozen on ESPN or ABC. Last year, ESPN set records for audiences tuning in across a season, including 1.4 million for the national title match between Texas A&M and Kentucky, the second-most-watched ever.Fox ratings insider Mike Mulvihill noted on Twitter that women’s college volleyball feels a lot like women’s college basketball a few years ago — people are tuning in, and the events and programming slots are increasing to account for it. (Not to mention, the momentum also comes as two U.S. pro leagues are competing to gain a foothold. Volleyball at Intuit Dome, anyone?)Looking at the programming schedules across ESPN and Fox’s networks, Sunday afternoons are slotted as NFL counter-programming, and Wednesday and Friday nights are largely NFL-free windows where more fans might give volleyball a look.In a week, pro and college football will resume their TV domination.But during this moment just before it restarts, college women’s volleyball is taking advantage of the vacuum to stake its claim as the next big thing in sports TV.Get Caught UpBig talkers from the sports business industry:Who gets to play college football? We have the latest example of “Yes, there are limits.”Just like we discussed a few weeks ago with global outrage from FIFA’s misstep trying to spin off the World Cup to private investors or earlier this year with college football balking at Texas Tech rostering QB Brendan Sorsby, the two major power college conferences — the Big Ten and the SEC — stopped waiting for NCAA leadership or Congressional fiat around recent issues related to player eligibility.
Ahead of NFL stadium debut, why women’s college volleyball is the next big thing
This week's sports-business newsletter from The Athletic, including college football's NFL mess, Good Good Golf's bad bad week and more.






