The TV sports lineup for the first weekend of December will feature some of the top ranked college football and basketball teams as well as a major pay-per-view boxing event. 

College football will enter the final leg of its regular season with several key matchups, including a primetime matchup between top-ranked Alabama and LSU (CBS) and afternoon games featuring fifth-ranked Texas A&M at Auburn (ESPN), fourth-ranked Ohio State (pictured) at Michigan State (ABC), and third-ranked Clemson at Virginia Tech (ABC).

Boxing will once again take center stage in the pay-per-view combat sports ring with Fox Sports’ Errol Spence-Danny Garcia welterweight championship fight. The fight, which will retail at $74.95, will pit two of the top welterweight fighters in the sport.

The NFL will look to complete its week 13 Sunday schedule without any major COVID-19-related postponements outside of moving its Baltimore Ravens-Dallas Cowboys Dec. 3 Thursday Night Football game to Tuesday (Dec. 8) and Sunday's Washington Team-Pittsburgh Steelers games to Monday (Dec. 7.)  NBC’s primetime Sunday Night Football game features an AFC West matchup between the Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs.

College basketball will feature an early matchup of top-ranked teams as number one Gonzaga plays second-ranked Baylor Saturday afternoon (CBS), while 12th-ranked Villanova travels to play 17th-ranked Texas (ESPN). 

NBC and NBCSN will continue its coverage of Premier League soccer games on Saturday and Sunday, while ESPN on Sunday will televise the Sakhir Grand Prix Formula One auto racing event.

CBS News concedes it should have let viewers know it has a rights deal for Southern Educational Conference (SEC) football broadcasts and has included now that disclosure in the online version of a 60 Minutes story about a conference powerhouse and its colorful coach.

The debut of the 53rd season of the iconic news magazine that aired Sunday (Sept. 20) included a profile of Ed Orgeron, the coach of the National champion LSU Tigers, who CBS billed as a master motivator and ace recruiter. The piece featured an interview with 60 Minutes' Jon Wertheim in which Orgeron talked about his desire for a college football season even in the midst of the pandemic and concerns about player health and safety.

A promo for SEC football ran during the broadcast and included the CBS logo and the piece itself included the observation that "some powerhouse football programs make in excess of $100 million in annual revenue, mostly from giant television rights contracts, in helping to explain the pressure on college football to proceed during the pandemic. "The incentive for schools to salvage this season and play through the pandemic is clear," the piece pointed out. "The incentive for players is less clear."

But what 60 Minutes neglected to point out in the piece was that CBS has just such a TV rights contract with the SEC and thus a financial interest in the promoting and playing of SEC football games.

When asked why that information was not included, a 60 Minutes spokesman said: "We should have mentioned CBS Sports ownership of SEC broadcast rights in our coverage of LSU Football, a member of the SEC," adding: "We will include that in the online version of the story."

At press time CBS had added the following to that online version: "LSU belongs to the SEC, the college football conference whose games are broadcast on CBS."

ESPN’s coverage of the LSU-Clemson college football championship game helped the network top the primetime cable weekly ratings charts last week, while the continuing Impeachment proceedings were ratings gold for Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.

ESPN averaged 4.3 million viewers in primetime during the week of Jan. 13-19 to top all cable networks, according to Nielsen. The sports network was paced by its coverage of the Jan. 13 College Football Playoff National Championship game -- won by LSU over last year’s champs Clemson -- which drew more than 25 million viewers.

Fox News (2.8 million viewers), MSNBC (1.9 million) and CNN (1.5 million) occupied the next three spots on the primetime chart, buoyed by their respective coverage of the ongoing Impeachment proceedings.

TLC finished fifth for the week with 1.1 million viewers, followed by HGTV, A&E and Hallmark Channel (all tied with 1 million viewers), History (955,000) and Discovery Channel (884,000).

On the total day ratings front, Fox News dominated the pack with 1.6 million viewers, followed by ESPN, MSNBC, CNN and HGTV, according to Nielsen. 

ESPN’s live telecast of the LSU-Clemson College Football Playoffs National Championship game Monday night averaged more than 25 million viewers, according to Nielsen.

The audience for the game, in which LSU defeated the defending champion Clemson 42-21 to complete the team's undefeated season, was up 3% from last year’s Alabama-Clemson CFP National Championship telecast, which drew 24.3 million viewers, according to ESPN.

ESPN’s MegaCast presentation of LSU’s victory -- which included viewers from ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU and ESPNews -- delivered an initial audience of 25.5 million viewers, surpassing the 25.2 million viewers generated by ESPN’s MegaCast audience for Clemson’s win in last season's championship game.

(Updated on Oct. 25 12:45 p.m.)

This week, ESPN is turning to men who have made their living luring ducks to make a call about whether Tigers will beat Rebels in Death Valley on a Louisiana Saturday night.

College GameDay’s road show has set up shop on the Parade Grounds at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. There, Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit, Dave Pollack, Desmond Howard and Lee Corso will be joined by Willie Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame (pictured with Mike the Tiger) and his brother Jase as the guest pickers, with the No. 24 Bayou Bengals hosting No. 3 Ole Miss on ESPN at 7 p.m. (ET).

In past stops at Baton Rouge, GameDay went Tiger with LSU athletes Olympian LoLo Jones and The Beard, pitcher Brian Wilson, sharing their pigskin predictions.

Instead on Oct. 25, GameDay is playing the home state card. Robertson was born in Bernice, graduated from The University of Louisiana at Monroe and lives in West Monroe . He’s CEO of Duck Commander, the Robertson family’s duck call and outdoor business. Jase is COO of Duck Commander and is credited with creating its triple threat call.

Perhaps GameDay would have earned more gridiron credibility if the picks were made by Willie and Jase's father, Phil, the inventor of the patented duck call and founder of the multimillion dollar Duck Commander enterprise. He also played quarterback ahead of one Terry Bradshaw at Louisiana Tech back in the day. Phil Robertson, though, totes a certain amount of baggage in the wake of the anti-homosexual remarks he made in a GQ magazine interview that resulted in A&E briefly suspending the Duck Dynasty leader.

Of course, none of the Robertsons has the current appeal or perkiness of Katy Perry, who was GameDay’s guest picker during the pregame show's visit to The Grove in Oxford, Miss. on Oct. 4, when the pop star presciently prognosticated that Ole Miss would top Alabama.

Perry, though, was not embraced so readily in Baton Rouge, though.  Three weeks ago, her message to LSU fans was let them eat corndogs as she picked the Auburn Tigers over the ones favored on the bayou. There were any number of signs in the crowd that depicted the foodstuff in the singer's mouth. For his part, Willie pointed out on GameDay that corn dogs are not widely construed to be among Louisiana's culinary delights.

For the record, the GameDay guys and the guest pickers picked LSU to geaux over Mississippi.

It wasn’t Saturday Night in Death Valley, which was probably a good thing for Auburn, considering that tigers hunt nocturnally and how blood-thirsty things became in the Baton Rouge afternoon.

As LSU fans have lamented the lack of a 2011 SEC night game in their storied lair, it may have amplified their purple and gold snarl — even though their Tigers donned mostly white stripes on Saturday afternoon.

Following the customary pregame tour of Mike VI, LSU’s 450-pound Bengali-Siberian mascot, in his caged circus cart around the perimeter of Les Miles’s favorite patch of grass, it was the Tiger Bowl.

No. 1 LSU, sans suspended top running back Spencer Ware, executed a well-scripted opening drive, capped by one of his replacements, freshman Kenny Hilliard, scoring on a nine-yard run. After Rob Brooks, making like Tyrann Mathieu who was also banned from the battle, forced Auburn to settle for three by batting away a seeming TD pass late in the first quarter, the contest bogged down amid a slew of three-and-outs and CBS commercial pods (proving again that the official with the red hat is the most important man on the field.)

Then, LSU pounced with ferocity. During the last five minutes of the half, reinstated QB Jordan Jefferson, moved on up in the pocket, to hit a streaking Rueben Randle in full stride past three Auburn DBs. Jarrett Lee, then emulated the man he succeeded, hitting Randle on a similar go route along the right sideline, albeit beating just two defenders in the process, to make it 21-3 with 40 seconds left in the half. Randle’s grabs came right at us — my son Alex is a sophomore at LSU — in the corner of the end zone! Thanks Amy.

But Auburn’s role as Tiger bait had just begun. After the visitors punted to start the third quarter, Russell Shephard dove inside the pylon off a Lee swing pass. A fumble recovery, following a massive hit on the ensuing kickoff by safety Eric Reid, set up a Hilliard ground-and-pound score. Then, Brooks delivered another Honey Badger impersonation, stepping in front of a short pass and taking it to the house. Five TDs in a 12.5-minute span on the clock! Revenge for LSU’s 24-17 loss to Auburn last season was best served quickly by this ambush of Fighting Tigers.

It was then the old building really got loud, as the 93,098 patrons, the second-largest crowd in the history of Tiger Stadium, pulsated like a scene from Gladiator or Starz’s Spartacus franchise, reveling in the on-field brutality. Sensing the kill, the roar went up for a vicious clothesline on a kickoff that would have made Vince McMahon proud. Several lifts and drops of Auburn RBs Michael Dyer and Onterrio McCalebb, who had to leave the game momentarily, and six QB sacks, also stirred the bloodlust.

Finally sated with the carnage, the crowd and LSU let up late, conceding a TD to the Lee County breed of Tigers, which endured the worst clawing –45-10 — for a defending NCAA champ since Miami’s 38-3 defeat at the hands of Florida State in 1984, back in Jimmy Johnson’s first year replacing Howard Schnellenberger. Auburn’s defeat — its most lopsided loss in the 46-game series with LSU — was tied for the fourth-worst by a defending champ in 75 years.

With No. 2 Alabama throttling Tennessee after a sluggish start that saw the Tide tied at 6 at the half, Nick Saban and Miles will square off the 8-0 SEC West rivals in this year’s college football game of the century at Bryant-Denney Stadium on Nov. 5. Nothing more than the inside track to the conference crown and the BCS national title tilt is at stake.

Indeed, ESPN’s on-air crew of Rece Davis, Lou Holtz and Mark May introduced the countdown clock to the tussle in Tuscaloosa on Saturday evening.

The contest, originally scheduled for CBS’s late afternoon window slot — Black Rock’s contract calls for one primetime SEC Saturday affair, as this year’s selection featured Bama-Florida on Oct. 8 — has been shifted to an 8 p.m. kickoff , via a little rights trading with ESPN, Versus and the CBS Sports Network.

Army-Air Force, which had been scheduled to appear on Versus, is now CBS’s 3:30 game on Nov. 5, with the NBCU service picking up TCU-Colorado State on Nov. 19 from CBS Sports Network. More importantly, in exchange for scheduling considerations next season, ESPN opened up its primetime window, so CBS can show Bama-LSU under the lights. (On Oct. 24, LSU vice chancellor and director of athletics Joe Alleva, in an email note to ticket buyers, indicated that during the discussions pertaining to the move of the LSU-Alabama game to a night-time kickoff on Nov. 5, CBS committed its 2012 SEC primetime telecast to the Tide and Fighting Tigers at Tiger Stadium.)

Now, the question is whether the Tigers, presumably with an especially angry Honey Badger in tow, can — last season in the din of the Death Valley night, the home team won 24-21 — topple an elephant in Tuscaloosa, or whether the pachyderm will prevail over the Bayou Bengals in front of more than 101,000.