After five days of counting votes, former vice president Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election. The extended nature of the count left some networks with hard programming decisions.
NBC in particular had to decide if it would interrupt Saturday’s highly anticipated matchup between No. 1 Clemson and No. 4 Notre Dame for Biden’s victory speech. Like other networks, NBC picked Biden and decided to air the game on its sister USA Network while the president-elect spoke. ABC made a similar decision with Stanford-Oregon.
NBC made it very clear this would happen, announcing it would make the switch ahead of time and having broadcaster Mike Tirico repeatedly warn viewers during the game.