• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, September 2, 2014

With college football season upon us, advertisers will have a new way to target fans. It's via a new national network aggregating radio broadcasts from dozens of big college football schools, courtesy of IMG College, an independent college sports radio network.

The company also announced an expanded partnership with TuneIn to bring more college sports broadcasts to the Internet radio service.

The new IMG College Radio Network brings together ad inventory from 40 universities with football broadcasts, achieving wide distribution thanks to around 400 affiliate stations in 200 markets across the U.S. According to IMG, that will give advertisers access to an estimated 4 million listeners ages 25-54 per week across the network, most of them highly engaged members of local followings.

IMG’s expanded partnership with TuneIn gives roughly 50 million listeners who use the Internet radio platform access to every college football broadcast, as well as additional content from all the 60 IMG College-affiliated teams. Among the 57 new schools available this season are major college football programs from Florida State, Auburn, Georgia, Michigan, Kansas, Texas, Virginia Tech, Ohio State, South Carolina, Ole Miss and Nebraska.

Each team will have its own dedicated channel with round-the-clock content, including live play-by-play broadcasts, pre-game and post-game shows, live weekly coaches shows, and in-season game replays. According to IMG and TuneIn, last season around one million TuneIn users listened to Pac-12 games each month.

TuneIn will also carry basketball coverage from the participating IMG schools beginning in November.

TuneIn has been beefing up its sports content in recent months. In June, the online radio service struck a deal with ESPN Radio, giving TuneIn users access to eight of ESPN’s popular podcast channels, as well as ESPN Today in Sports, ESPN Perspectives and live coverage of major events like the World Cup.

Back in March, TuneIn announced that it would carry live play-by-play coverage of the 2014 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship, courtesy of radio content syndicator WestwoodOne. TuneIn also got WestwoodOne coverage of additional NCAA championship events, including the Division I Women's Final Four in basketball, the Men’s Frozen Four in hockey, the Men’s and Women’s College World Series in baseball and the Division I Men’s Lacrosse Semifinals and Championship.