Monday brought the full start of college basketball season, with both men’s and women’s games taking place across the country at all hours of the day.
Eagle-eyed viewers on ESPN noticed two somewhat significant changes in the network’s broadcasts of the sport. The WorldWide Leader had debuted a new scorebug, and the network had moved on from the BottomLine.
No Bottom Line ticker for college basketball on the main ESPN network: https://t.co/wlqmIPJdk1
— Ben Huddleston (@sportswithben1) November 2, 2026
Awful Announcing has learned that those changes reflect ESPN’s approach to the BottomLine for live game action during college basketball broadcasts moving forward.
The move is new to college basketball, but not to ESPN. The network also pulled the BottomLine from its college football broadcasts at the start of the season, opening up more space to show the action happening on the field. Now, the same is true of the basketball court.
While any change to a broadcast is always going to be met with something of a mixed reaction, moving on from the BottomLine was a necessary step into the future in college football, and the same is true for basketball. There was a time when the BottomLine was a valuable resource to fans wanting to keep track of all of the action happening at once across the sporting world, and ESPN was as trusted a curator of such information as you could hope to have.
But times have changed. In 2026, the vast majority of the viewing audience has a phone or tablet in their hand while watching the game on television, which serves the purpose of the BottomLine better than the BottomLine ever could. Hurting the primary broadcast’s ability to show the game in order to make space for information that viewers were already getting elsewhere was simply unsustainable.
Fans of the BottomLine fear not, though, as the graphic will still be present across pregame, halftime, and postgame programming at ESPN. Additionally, select games will feature a graphic in the top-right corner that shows score updates from across the sport.
It’s a brave new world, and the BottomLine simply doesn’t fit as well into game broadcasts as it once did.
The post ESPN debuts new college basketball scorebug, removes BottomLine appeared first on Awful Announcing.