Fox reveals biggest Friday night college football slate to date

Credit: Matthew O'Haren-Imagn Images

Fox’s Friday night college football window keeps expanding.

On Friday, Fox and the Big Ten Conference announced the full 2026 Fox College Football Friday schedule, which features 11 games from the Big Ten, Big 12, and Mountain West. That’s up from ten games in 2025 and eight in the inaugural 2024 slate, when the series launched after WWE’s SmackDown vacated Fox’s Friday primetime window.

Here are the announced matchups (all times ET):

• Friday, Sept. 4: Fresno State at USC, 9 p.m.
• Friday, Sept. 11: Missouri vs. Kansas (Border Showdown), 8 p.m.
• Friday, Sept. 18: Houston vs. Texas Tech, 8 p.m.
• Friday, Sept. 25: Northwestern at Indiana, 8 p.m.
• Friday, Oct. 2: Penn State at Northwestern (Ryan Field inaugural game), 8 p.m.
• Friday, Oct. 9: Iowa at Washington, 9 p.m.
• Friday, Oct. 16: Washington at Purdue, 8 p.m.
• Friday, Nov. 6: Nebraska at Illinois, 8 p.m.
• Friday, Nov. 13: Illinois at UCLA, 9 p.m.
• Friday, Nov. 20: Oregon at Michigan State, 8 p.m.
• Friday, Dec, 4: Mountain West Championship, 9 p.m.

When Fox first announced the Friday night college football concept in early 2024, the network was betting that games that might otherwise get buried on a crowded Saturday could find a bigger audience with no competition. The results bore that out. The debut drew 2.58 million viewers for a blowout between Arizona and Kansas State — Fox’s best Friday night in five months — and the second week drew 4.21 million for an Illinois-Nebraska overtime game, which Fox’s president of insight and analytics, Mike Mulvihill called evidence that “an exciting game that may have been overlooked on Saturday will likely end up being one of the five most-watched CFB games of the week.” Fox subsequently turned Friday nights into a year-round sports block, adding College Basketball Friday in the winter and UFL Friday in the spring, and the window has grown each year since.

Several games stand out on the 2026 slate. Indiana hosting Northwestern on Sept. 25 is the Hoosiers’ first Big Ten home game as defending national champions. Oct.2 2 brings the inaugural game at Northwestern’s new Ryan Field, which replaces a stadium that opened in 1926. The Border Showdown between Missouri and Kansas on Sept. 11 is a revival of a rivalry that went dormant after Missouri left the Big 12 for the SEC in 2012, leaving the Big 12 without one of its signature in-conference matchups for more than a decade.

The Friday night window has a fraught history in the Big Ten that predates Fox’s involvement. When the conference first announced Friday games in 2016, Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State pushed back, the plan was scaled back, and the resistance was significant enough that an Iowa state legislator tried to ban Iowa and Iowa State from hosting Friday games entirely. Those three programs are again largely absent from the 2026 schedule, consistent with every year the series has run, with Penn State’s trip to the new Ryan Field the only exception.

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