Why Can't I Watch the College Football Game I Want?

Coming from an Ohio State fan, this might seem a bit strange. In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that my wife and most of her family graduated from Oklahoma State University. One of her favorite lines is that my family accepted her because she graduated from "an OSU" if not "THE OSU."

Checking out the coverage maps (and sorry if the link doesn't work past today) on the ABC Sports website, I see that we live in the small part of the country that will receive the U Michigan vs. Michigan State game at 2:30 Central today. Given that Michigan isn't all that good this year, I expect that game to be a clunker, even if it is a rivalry game. I would MUCH rather watch the U Texas vs. OK State game, also being played at 2:30 Central, and which the majority of the country will get to see. It's a matchup of #1 vs. #6, and should be a high scoring affair. Big 12 teams (including Texas and OK State) occupy four of the top five spots in the list of highest scoring offenses this year.

In fact, a very good argument could be made (and probably should be made) that the Texas-OK State game should have been the prime time 7 pm Central matchup, since #1 vs. #6 is a better matchup than Ohio State (#9) vs. Penn State (#3). It used to be not all that long ago, ABC would show a college football game of national interest at Noon Eastern, 11 am Central, before switching to regional coverage at the 2:30 Central time slot. They no longer do that, perhaps because not enough people were watching at 11 am Central. Now, the only way to get college football games being played at 11 am is to subscribe to a provider that carries ESPN, ESPN2, and/or ESPNU.

I am, of course, being a little selfish here. I assume that if ABC chose instead to carry the Texas-OK State game in prime time, they would then move the OSU-PSU game to the 2:30 Central regional coverage slot. In that case, I would get to see both games, since we live in the Midwest and almost always receive the Big 10 coverage that is available (like we are getting today, for example).

What counts against the Texas-OK State game is that OK State is not known as a football powerhouse. They have always been overshadowed in their own state by the team from Norman, OK. Yes, they produced the legendary Barry Sanders, and there are plenty of current NFL players who hail from the Stillwater campus. But the simple fact that they reached #6 in the rankings is pretty incredible in and of itself. Personally, I would love to see them win all their games (requiring knocking off #1 Texas and #4 Oklahoma), which should put them into the BCS National Title Championship game. How cool would that be?!

My real beef with ABC's segmenting the coverage map is this: even if I wanted to pay for coverage of the game, I have only one option for getting it. The game is not going to be carried on ESPN, ESPN2, or ESPNU, since ABC has the game (yes, I know all those channels are controlled by the same parent company). So subscribing to cable would not help one iota. The cable company in our area, Comcast, also does not provide the ESPN360.com service to its subscribers, so that isn't an option.

The only way to get the Texas-OK State game today is to instead subscribe to DirecTV, and to then pay the extra fee to get the ESPN GamePlan package of college football games. The current October GamePlan lineup is here, and you have to scroll down to get the 25 Oct lineup. I haven't actually had a DirecTV sales guy come out to our house to check our sight lines to their satellite, but with the high trees all around our house, we might not even be able to get DirecTV's signal.

Which goes to a much bigger beef of mine with the current state of affairs with regards to TV providers. You already know that we don't subscribe to cable or DirecTV. Even if we did get cable, there have been numerous examples recently of cable companies refusing to carry channels that provide content I would want to see. The recent rollouts of the BigTen Network and the NFL Network, and the subsequent court battles between those entities and cable companies to fight over how much to charge subscribers and on what tier to carry them, only serve to prove the point. In too many cases, the cable subscribers (and there are still large numbers of U.S. households that simply can't get a good feed from a DirecTV satellite) are frozen out of being able to watch the content they want.

It's gotten so that in America, the land of the free and the home of market based economics, even people who are willing to pay to receive certain content are not able to receive that content. Why? It's because the already wealthy fat cats in charge of incredibly prosperous private companies fight over which one of them is going to line their pockets even more. Frankly, I'm disgusted by all of it! Which is just one more reason why I get my TV signals over the air. I'm not giving any more money to those fat cats.

"Choice, man!"

The VP Debate, After Effects

I'm not entirely convinced that last night's VP debate did anything to shift the scales on this general election. I say that, even though I continue with my previous assessment: if Sarah Palin didn't have some gaffe or obvious blunder during the debate, then she won it.

During the debate, Sarah demonstrated her folksiness ("You betcha!"), her ability and willingness to take Biden and Obama head-on, and a fair amount of Refreshing Reaganism, as the PBS commentators called it last night. I have to admit that I was unable to actually watch the debate, since I was driving back from a business meeting in Indianapolis during the majority of the debate. But hearing Palin speak (thank you, NPR, for airing the debate!) made it sound like she was not intimidated by a veteran Washington Insider like Biden. She didn't come right out and attack him for being an insider until about an hour into the debate, and that could be a missed opportunity for her. But I don't think her candidacy will any longer be thought of as "Gidget Goes to Washington," another PBS reference at the end of the debate.

Palin obviously crammed very well in the foothills of Sedona, AZ, at the McCain ranch during this past week. She knew her facts and figures, even if she didn't hit the numbers as hard as Biden did. She knew her foreign policy stance much better than she has shown in previous interviews, and she came across much more credibly than she had during those interviews. All in all, she showed that she should be taken seriously as a candidate for VP.

However, whether or not that actually changed anything with voters is a completely different story. As I said before, I have a hunch the die is already cast for an Obama presidency thanks to the economic meltdown and banking crisis of the past two weeks. The news this morning that the McCain/Palin campaign is suspending operations in the battleground state of Michigan doesn't look good. What's next, Ohio? Florida? I understand the need to shepherd resources and apply them to the best chances of victory, but what that really signals is either a lack of funding or a lack of momentum, both of which are critical to maintain in an election.

What I'm looking forward to at this point is the PBS Frontline review on both McCain and Obama, currently scheduled for 14 October in our local market. I trust this Frontline episode, entitled "The Choice: 2008" (more info is available here) will be as influential in making my election decision as the Frontline career retrospective on Bush and Kerry was in 2004.