If you just want to watch Sports™ and don’t particularly care what sport that is you’ll probably find at least one or two channels on the weekends that will be showing something. Most sports fans have particular teams they follow, though, and outside of the NFL most of those teams’ games will end up on cable. Even the NFL has the Monday Night Football game on ESPN (usually) and Thursday Night Football isn’t even on TV; it’s on Amazon Prime streaming. Broadcast channels have decided they don’t want to deal with the unpredictability of sports on weeknights to a large extent.
League championships are about the only thing we’ll see on most weeknights anymore, and I expect even those will move to cable at least sometimes. It is somewhat surprising since networks are starting to find live sports to be the biggest viewership draw nowadays; most fans want to see the results live. Other shows are easier to stream/binge later. But sports broadcast rights have also been getting more and more expensive and the networks are reluctant to pay for them.
You might be thinking of in the 20th century a local team’s games might show on a local broadcast channel. Usually this was an independent (no network affiliation) channel or they’d just preempt the network programming. The networks don’t like having their shows preempted (I know one station that switched from CBS to NBC a few years ago because CBS didn’t want them to keep preempting network programming for college sports) and regional cable channels came in offering more money for exclusive rights to all games except the nationally televised games. So a lot of games that used to be on broadcast moved to cable (cable also allowed some teams that used to only have some games broadcast to now broadcast their entire schedule). This hasn’t been entirely immune to the wider cable “cord cutting” phenomenon, though, and more sports are moving towards offering a streaming option on the Internet, although it’s usually not a complete option yet.
If you just want to watch Sports™ and don’t particularly care what sport that is you’ll probably find at least one or two channels on the weekends that will be showing something. Most sports fans have particular teams they follow, though, and outside of the NFL most of those teams’ games will end up on cable. Even the NFL has the Monday Night Football game on ESPN (usually) and Thursday Night Football isn’t even on TV; it’s on Amazon Prime streaming. Broadcast channels have decided they don’t want to deal with the unpredictability of sports on weeknights to a large extent.
League championships are about the only thing we’ll see on most weeknights anymore, and I expect even those will move to cable at least sometimes. It is somewhat surprising since networks are starting to find live sports to be the biggest viewership draw nowadays; most fans want to see the results live. Other shows are easier to stream/binge later. But sports broadcast rights have also been getting more and more expensive and the networks are reluctant to pay for them.
You might be thinking of in the 20th century a local team’s games might show on a local broadcast channel. Usually this was an independent (no network affiliation) channel or they’d just preempt the network programming. The networks don’t like having their shows preempted (I know one station that switched from CBS to NBC a few years ago because CBS didn’t want them to keep preempting network programming for college sports) and regional cable channels came in offering more money for exclusive rights to all games except the nationally televised games. So a lot of games that used to be on broadcast moved to cable (cable also allowed some teams that used to only have some games broadcast to now broadcast their entire schedule). This hasn’t been entirely immune to the wider cable “cord cutting” phenomenon, though, and more sports are moving towards offering a streaming option on the Internet, although it’s usually not a complete option yet.