Listen, it is not a novel concept to banish the on-screen ticker from live sporting events once and for all. We’ve written about it in the past here at Awful Announcing. But the year is now 2025, and fans are still bombarded with irrelevant, often distracting information at the bottom of their screens as they try to watch live games.
The very premise of the ticker is archaic in the same way that SportsCenter in the 1990s was a viable vessel to deliver information to sports fans, but is now a relic of the past. No one needs a ticker to find the information they want about sports in the year 2025, just as no one watches SportsCenter to become more informed about the goings on in the sports world. Everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket and can find whatever information they’re looking for within seconds.
So why do we still have an on-screen graphic that takes up 10% of your television’s real estate — space that could be used to provide a much cleaner and elegant looking broadcast?
Frankly, there’s not much of a valid answer, other than the ticker can be used as a promotional vehicle for whatever network is using it. But besides finding a way to serve football fans even more advertisements, the ticker has lost any sort of practical use. Even worse, it has increasingly become a distraction during live sporting events, making the viewing experience worse for fans.
This Saturday’s college football slate provided some of the worst examples in recent memory.
Let’s take the exciting Ole Miss-Georgia game from ABC’s mid-afternoon window. The top-10 affair was close throughout, with the Bulldogs using a fourth-quarter surge to beat the Rebels by a touchdown. By all measures, it was one of the most important college football contests this season to date. Yet, throughout the entire game, ABC kept its ticker up. And while that’s annoying purely because it takes space away from your screen that could hypothetically be showing football, the content of the ticker was even more frustrating.
Here’s one example shortly after Georgia scored a touchdown to pull within two in the fourth quarter. After returning from a commercial break, the ticker flashed bright yellow (the typical color for a “Score Update”) to show that, wouldn’t ya know, Georgia scored a touchdown to pull within two points of Ole Miss! Thank you, ABC. But actually, we’re already watching the game. We don’t need your flashing yellow distraction while actual football is happening.
— welovesports40 (@welovesports40) October 20, 2025
Later, during the drive that would ultimately determine the outcome of the game, there were even more distractions from the ABC ticker. With under two minutes to play, and Ole Miss down a touchdown with the ball, ABC kept its ticker active. This time, fans were met with another similar flashing yellow “Score Alert” for the Texas A&M-Arkansas game that was still in the first half. Mind you, we’re watching the most important play of the game for Ole Miss, only to have our attention broken by a score update featuring a two-win Arkansas team in the second quarter of its game. To make matters even worse, fans had just seen the updated score already scroll on the ticker moments before the bright yellow “Score Alert” came on-screen.
— welovesports40 (@welovesports40) October 20, 2025
ABC might not even be the worst offender when it comes to the ticker. That title likely goes to FS1.
Let’s take a look at a game between Maryland and UCLA in the 7 p.m. ET window on FS1. Again, we’re met with a permanent on-screen ticker. But somehow, FS1’s managed to be even more useless and distracting than ABC’s. Here’s how.
Georgia’s win over Ole Miss finished at approximately 7 p.m. ET, right when the Maryland-UCLA game kicked off. FS1 rightfully decided that Georgia’s win was important enough to alert its viewers of the result via the on-screen ticker. So, the network flashed “Upset Alert” in a big gold box on the ticker, before informing viewers that Georgia had beaten Ole Miss. No. 9 Georgia was, in fact, a 7.5 point favorite over No. 5 Ole Miss, but we’ll extend some grace regarding the use of “Upset Alert” based on the rankings.
What made FS1’s decision so egregious wasn’t the use of the word “upset,” but that the network decided to run this same flashy golden graphic across its ticker every single minute for 80 minutes! Fans of the Terps and Bruins had to watch the same score scroll across the bottom of their screens every minute for almost the entirety of the first half of their game.
That’s pretty annoying, but at least FS1 was showing some relevant information between the “Upset Alert” graphics, right? Well, I suppose if you’re a fan of the Saudi Premier League or the Canadian Premier League, you’re in luck! Yes, you read that right. In between the very regular reminders that Georgia had beaten Ole Miss, FS1 viewers were able to keep up with two of the most globally relevant soccer leagues in the world. Watch the monstrosity for yourself below:
— welovesports40 (@welovesports40) October 20, 2025
I’d be remiss to not also point out that, despite horrible ticker management from certain networks, other networks are getting with the times. Fox, it should be noted, doesn’t use a ticker for college football games on its main broadcast network, including the Big Noon window. Neither does CBS.
In fact, CBS may have made the best ticker innovation in quite some time with its NFL coverage this season. Rather than using the entire bottom portion of the screen to show scores from other games, CBS has introduced a small, transparent graphic in the upper-left portion of the screen that scrolls through scores, and gives alerts for scoring plays in other games. It’s noninvasive, and doesn’t distract from the action on the field. Overall, it’s a much cleaner look.
— welovesports40 (@welovesports40) October 20, 2025
There’s no reason every network shouldn’t move to a similar format. The broadcast looks better, full stop.
Heck, nothing is stopping networks from using the ticker sparingly. Are there some important scores and programming updates to communicate to the viewer? Put the ticker up for a couple of minutes, then take it back down. Even that is far preferable to the permanent on-screen ticker that some networks insist on.
No one is missing out on information they couldn’t otherwise find elsewhere. Stop distracting viewers with irrelevant nonsense. Put more football on the screen. Get with the times!