On March 5, 2013, Fox Sports announced that it would relaunch Speed as Fox Sports 1 on August 17, 2013. Fox has directly positioned the channel to be a major competitor to ESPN: studio programs featured on the channel will include the daily sports news program Fox Sports Live (which will compete directly against ESPN's SportsCenter), Rush Hour, a new early-evening program hosted by Regis Philbin, and Fox Football Daily (a companion program to Fox NFL Sunday).Beginning in 2014, Fox Sports 1 will air 26 weeks worth of regular season Major League Baseball games and coverage of select post-season games (the Fox network will air significantly fewer games as a result), and select NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races will be moved to the network as early as 2015.[8][9] College football and basketball games from the Big East,[10] Big 12, Conference USA and Pac-12 conferences, soccer matches from the UEFA Champions League, Europa League and CONCACAF Champions League along with rights to the Men’s and Women’s FIFA World Cup tournaments and Ultimate Fighting Championship events and live fights will also be featured on the new network.[2]
On November 27, Fox filed a logo and name trademark application for "Fox Sports 2" with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.[10] In January 2013, reports began surfacing that Fuel TV would be relaunched as "Fox Sports 2", a secondary national sports network that would be spun off from Fox Sports 1, another planned cable channel that was formally announced two months later on March 5, 2013 for an August 17 launch.[11] The proposed rebranding of Fuel, which was not announced in the initial presentation unveiling the launch of Fox Sports 1, is expected to take place around the same time as Speed's relaunch into the new primary Fox Sports national channel and would expand its slate of programming outside of extreme sports and watersports programs.[10][12]
