CBS Sports’ First-Ever Big Ten Football Championship Game Will Feature a Live Drone Inside Lucas Oil Stadium
The broadcaster’s studio show will be onsite for two hours of pregame coverage
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In a college-football season filled with firsts, here’s another: CBS will air the Big Ten Championship Game.
CBS Sports is out in force at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis for a marquee battle between Penn State and conference newcomer Oregon with an onsite pregame studio show opening the festivities at 6:00 p.m. ET (College Football Kickoff at 6 p.m., College Football Today at 7 p.m.) prior to the game at 8 p.m.
In a storied history of covering college football at the highest level, CBS Sports has seen almost everything, but this will mark its first time broadcasting the Big Ten Football Championship Game. CBS takes the Big Ten mantle from FOX Sports, which had produced this game since its inception in 2011.
“There’s certainly a heightened level of excitement knowing that, in our first full season of the Big Ten, the pinnacle of the season is this game and Indianapolis,” says Jason Cohen, SVP, remote technical operations, CBS Sports. “This became the focal point of everything we did from the start of the season.”
CBS Sports, of course, built a college-football legacy over the past two decades, delivering the SEC Championship Game to viewers from 2002 to ’23. Now its operations team is bringing many of its high-end production elements — and then some — to the Big Ten scene.
Most notably, the broadcaster will be making some tech history at this game, deploying a live drone indoors on a football game for the first time. Longtime drone partner Kaze Aerial Production will fly a custom-modified DJI drone throughout the interior of Lucas Oil Stadium during the broadcast, having received clearances from the Big Ten, the stadium itself, and local authorities.
It was clear to viewers of the Big Ten package this season that CBS prioritized use of the live drone to bring a special look to many of the iconic stadiums across the conference. It was a noted effort to bring a fresh perspective as a new rightsholder for the league, and, although Saturday’s game is being played inside a dome at Lucas Oil Stadium, the broadcaster wanted to carry drone use through to the end.
“That beautiful sweeping shot from the exterior of the stadium has been brought to life at a lot of big football games this season,” notes Cohen. “The drone technology has become our signature stamp, and we didn’t want to forego having a drone. We’ve worked very hard and closely with our partners to be able to fly the drone inside the stadium and give those incredible sweeping shots that only drones can do, but from inside the building. We’ll have a packed house with all the electric atmosphere and all the pageantry, and we can showcase all of that with the drone live for the first time ever inside a stadium for a football game. We’re really, really excited about it.”
Welcome to Bloomington, Indiana. Welcome to the Big Ten on CBS!
It’s @UMichFootball taking on undefeated No. 8 @IndianaFootball on @CBS and @paramountplus! pic.twitter.com/flf6lCQkGZ
— CBS Sports College Football 🏈 (@CBSSportsCFB) November 9, 2024
This isn’t the first time CBS Sports has flown a live drone indoors during an event inside a football stadium. It did so earlier this year at the NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, AZ, but Cohen notes that this is the first time inside for a football game.
“This is a landmark certainly for CBS,” he says. “This is hopefully going to be a launching pad for us and maybe other networks to be able to do the same in other sports. This is a big deal, doing it inside the building.”
The live drone will be just one piece of tech at the disposal of legendary producer/director tandem Craig Silver and Steve Milton, who will be at the front bench for Saturday night’s game. Working out of F&F Productions GTX-20 A, B, and C units (which have traveled with the CBS crew to each afternoon Big Ten game this season), Milton will call from a bountiful list of camera options: Skycam, jibs on each sideline, cart cameras on each sideline, a 4K camera at each high end zone, a fixed-wing aerial in the sky outside the stadium, goal-line and line-to-gain pylon cameras from Cosm, robos in the stadium tunnels and catwalks, 14 super-slo-mos. Also onsite is the Falcon 360, an immersive 360-degree camera offering panoramic views, which has been deployed all season by the Big Ten game crew and also over the summer at the PGA Championship in Louisville, KY.
Between all the game tech enhancements, the live studio show, and a juicy matchup on the field, Saturday night’s production promises to be a fitting exclamation point on what has been a significant transitional year for CBS Sports and its college-football team.
“I think the message in the offseason,” says Cohen, “was to not just take what we have done in college football and carbon-copy it for the Big Ten but to take how we approach all of our properties and all of our big shows and figure out what we can do to make this particular package feel special. We wanted to make it feel like it’s a CBS Sports property.
“We already had in our minds a very high-quality show that we were very proud of for many years at the SEC,” he continues. “We started from a place of strength. Then we certainly put tremendous emphasis in going into the Big Ten season with making sure that we added technology, we added cameras, we added everything that we could to increase and build on what we’ve been doing for years and making the Big Ten feel big, which is what I think people in the conference and fans around the country expect. I think it’s what we prided ourselves in being able to do.”
The Big Ten Championship Game will air on CBS on Saturday beginning at 8 p.m. ET. Pregame coverage begins on CBS at 6 p.m.
