Is ESPN+ worth it for sports? Where this fall's good games aired

By Vivek Tanna · Published November 12, 2026

"Is ESPN+ worth it?" and "Is Peacock worth it for sports?" are usually answered with channel lists and rights deals. I wanted a different answer: of the games each service actually carried this fall, how many turned out to be worth watching?

The Lineup Is rates every game it follows, so I went back through every finished game from September 1 to November 10, 2026, and grouped them by the network each one was listed on. Then I counted how many of each network's games cleared our bar for worth watching.

What I counted

We finished 7,746 games in that window across football, basketball, hockey, baseball, soccer, tennis, golf and motorsports, excluding preseason. 4,247 had a network listed, and 860 of those cleared the bar. The rest had no listing, and 2,814 of those were tennis matches, so tennis barely shows up below.

A few things to keep in mind:

• A game can air on more than one channel, but our data lists one network per game. Read every number here as "where we saw it listed," not as a complete rights map.
• I merged obvious duplicates (Fox and FOX, for example) but kept ESPN+, ESPN Unlimited and the ESPN TV channels separate because that's how they were listed.
• A network needs at least 15 games to make the main table. That leaves 37 networks and 4,079 games.
• Ratings here use our scoring as of November 12, which gives regular-season overtime and early upset leads less weight than it used to.

The networks with the most good games

Sorted by how many games cleared the bar, out of the networks that carried at least 15:

Two patterns jump out. The volume services (ESPN+, Paramount+, ESPN Unlimited) carried plenty of good games in total but also the most forgettable ones, so their share is low. The broadcast networks and the services that only buy a few marquee windows (NBC, ABC, Fox, Prime Video, TBS) carried far fewer games, but close to half or more of them were worth watching. At the bottom, the conference streaming add-ons were thin: ACCNX had 1 of 77 and SECN+ had 2 of 79.

Counted together, the ESPN and ABC family of channels and streams carried 2,051 of the listed games and 270 of the good ones, a little under a third.

Sport by sport

The overall table mixes sports, which flatters anyone with lots of football. Here's who carried the most good games in each, with games listed in brackets. Small counts are small samples, so treat a 5-of-8 as a hint, not a verdict.

NFL

Fox led with 28 good games (of 51), then CBS with 23 (of 52). NBC had 7 (of 10), Prime Video 5 (of 8), ESPN 3 (of 9) and NFL Network 3 (of 5). Sunday afternoons on Fox and CBS are still where most of the good NFL games were.

College football

ESPN had 21 (of 59), ESPN2 15 (of 47) and ABC 13 (of 30), the best share of anyone with ten or more games. Fox had 12 of 35, while ESPN+ needed 159 games to get to 10. Big Ten Network had 2 of 37.

NBA

Only a few weeks of the season so far. NBA League Pass had 20 good games (of 76), NBA TV 5 (of 12), ESPN 4 (of 8), Prime Video 4 (of 6) and NBC 3 (of 6).

NHL

ESPN+ was most of the NHL slate in our data: 233 games, 37 worth watching. ESPN had 4 of 12, NHL Network 5 of 22 and Disney+ 2 of 13. TNT had 1 of 12.

MLB

MLB.TV had 120 good games out of 325, all of them in the September stretch run. The national windows were where the biggest games ended up: TBS had 13 of 14, FS1 9 of 9, Fox 7 of 8, NBC 5 of 8, and ESPN Unlimited 18 of 29.

Soccer

Paramount+ had the most good soccer games, 71 of 418, but the split by competition is the real story. Its Champions League games went 32 of 58 and its Serie A games 30 of 81, while its Championship games went 1 of 81, its Europa League games 2 of 62 and its Conference League games 0 of 54. Apple TV had 37 of 183, almost all MLS. ESPN Deportes had 31 of 80, mostly LaLiga (28 of 66). The Premier League was split between USA Network (17 of 34) and Peacock (16 of 31), close to half on both.

What this means if you're choosing a service

A big catalog isn't the same as a lot of good games. ESPN+ is a good example: only MLB.TV carried more worth-watching games, and fewer than one in ten of its games were ones I'd sit down for. If your team's games are mostly listed there, as most NHL and a lot of college basketball games were in our data, that's fine. If you just want the best game on a given night, a service with a short list of marquee windows will hit more often.

Paramount+ is mostly a question of which competition you care about. The Champions League and Serie A carried it this fall, and almost none of the good games came from the second-tier English or European competitions.

Peacock's sports value in our data was mostly the Premier League: 16 of its 31 Premier League games were worth watching. Its other 28 games were spread across college football, college basketball and baseball, and 9 of them cleared the bar.

Broadcast TV still carries a lot of the best games. NBC, ABC, Fox and CBS together were listed on 261 games and 122 cleared the bar, close to half. An antenna covers more than people assume.

And the add-on conference streams rarely had the game you'd want. If you're paying for one, it should be because your team plays there.

Our take

The real question is rarely "which service is best." It's "what's worth watching tonight on what I already pay for." The Lineup Is shows each game's network on the card and on the day pages at thelineup.is/tonight, so you can see what's good and where it's on, then pick the one you can actually watch.

The Lineup Is is an iPhone app that ranks every game by whether it's worth watching and tells you when one gets good.

Get The Lineup Is on iOS — free — or see tonight's best games ranked right now. More from the blog.