|
|
|
6/30 Roundtable - The National Title On ESPN?
|
|
|
|
CollegeFootballNews.com
Posted Jun 30, 2009
|
|
6/30 Roundtable - Does it matter that the BCS, including the national title, is moving to ESPN in 2011? It's the Tuesday topic in the CFN Daily Roundtable Discussion.
|
CFN Daily Roundtables
 June
30
Does it matter that the BCS will move
to ESPN in 2011?
Over the next several weeks, as part of the CFN 2009 Preview, we'll
examine some of the key questions going into the year with a
daily discussion of the big topics.
Pete
Fiutak,
CFN
Yes, I'm part of
the problem. You can check me out at
twitter.com/CFN_Fiu and find
out future roundtable topics and other random musings.
Q: Does it matter that all the BCS games, including the BCS
Championship, will be on ESPN in 2011?
A: Technically, no. ESPN is
fantastic at doing college football with a pregame show that continues
to be the best in the business, and an end of the day wrap up with Rece
Davis, Lou Holtz, and Mark May that's second only to TNT's NBA coverage
when it comes to being both interesting and entertaining. But from a
prestige factor, the move of our beloved national championship to cable
has put it, and college football, on the fast track to second-tier
status.
ESPN has claimed that there's no difference anymore in
the minds of sports fans between network television and ESPN. Forgetting
that roughly 20 million more households have Fox than have ESPN, the
logic is flawed as far as the prestige value. Would the Super Bowl ever
go to ESPN? No, but why not? If there's no difference between ABC and
ESPN, then why not put the NFL's championship on cable? Because it's the
Super Bowl. The BCS Championship isn't the Super Bowl, but it's the
third most important sporting event in America with the entirety of the
NCAA men's basketball tournament No. 2 (although not the Final Four),
and it deserves the biggest spotlight possible.
Monday Night
Football used to be a weekly event, but now it's just another game
blurred into the mass of ESPN programming, while the Sunday night game
on NBC has become the NFL's new showcase event. Part of the reason is
that NBC gets the biggest games with the flex scheduling, but part of
the reason is the feeling that it's important enough to have a primetime
network slot to go up against Desperate Housewives, HBO, and
the rest of the prime programming. What's ABC going to put on in place
of the BCS Championship? Wipeout? Some show where they give
more houses to needy families? Who cares?
On ESPN, the
game is self-contained. Only sports fans will watch ESPN, and for those
of us who love the sport, we'll get all day coverage of the event geared
towards the die-hards. If it's on ABC, the national championship is part
of the culture. On ESPN, the game will be on, there will be post-game
coverage, and then yet another poker tournament will be on. If the
national title game is on ABC, it'll get casual fans to tune in who
don't know what channel ESPN is on the dial, or don't have the expanded
cable package, and it'll have the feel of something important. That's
more important for a sport than it might appear from a straight business
aspect. If it's not important enough to be on network TV, it's going to
eventually be pigeon-holed as a niche even and will be ignored by the
same casual sports fans who stay away from other big sports on cable in
droves.
Really, it doesn't matter too much to anyone other than
really silly people like me. To me, this is the jump-the-shark moment
that baseball took when the playoffs went on TBS, or TNT, or whichever
one of the two isn't showing Shawshank Redemption that night,
but it's not as massive a move as the one made by the NHL when it sold
out to wilderness of Versus. ESPN will do a great job, and the more
Chris Fowler, the better. However, if there's a Stuart Scott sighting of
any kind, I'm going to break something tasteful.
Richard
Cirminiello,
CFN
Q:
Does it matter that all the BCS games, including the BCS Championship,
will be on ESPN in 2011?
A:
Sure it does. It should matter to anyone, who enjoys watching college
football in January.
To me, Fox just didn’t measure up to the
magnitude of these games, so I’m one who’ll be happy to see them go
after this regular season. It was a bad fit from the outset.
ESPN, whether you love it or hate it, will make sure that the BCS games
are in good hands. No one does college football better. Period. Heck, it
covers the sport for 12 months, providing a year-long connection to the
fans, and has the best stable of announcers. Fox fumbled this
opportunity badly. ESPN will pick up the loose ball, take it back for a
score, and then probably get flagged for excessive celebration. Yeah,
some of its on-air staff can be more annoying than the ShamWow guy, but
nobody on the planet does a better job of covering college sports. And
for that reason, the change in network coverage from Fox to ESPN will
wind up being a resounding win for the viewing audience.
Matthew
Zemek, CFN
Q:
Does it matter that all the BCS games, including the BCS Championship,
will be on ESPN in 2011?
A:
In the sense that our media landscape will be incredibly different just
two or three (let alone eight or nine) years from now, no—it won’t. But
from the standpoint of the low-income individual who cannot afford cable
channels on top of free broadcast networks, yeah, this definitely
matters. Any showcase sporting event—you don’t need to be a rocket
scientist to make the relevant identifications—should be on a regular
network, a channel one doesn’t have to pay for. At least, that’s the
situation as it currently stands.
The Obama Administration was
supposed to have pressured the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
about re-doing cable packages so that they could be arranged a la carte,
thereby saving the consumer a lot of dough and giving Mr. and Mrs.
Remote Control real leverage in deciding just how many stations they
want to pull into their living room. But since Mr. President has been
unresponsive and/or beholden to moneyed interests on this issue (one
hopes it’s the former, but suspects it’s the latter), a struggling or
impoverished football fan deserves to have ABC or some other non-cable
outlet televise the BCS title game and the other showcase bowls. You can
always give the FCC a call—it would be recommended that you do so. In
the meantime, lament ESPN’s premature takeover of the BCS franchise.
Hunter Ansley,
Publisher,
DraftZoo.com
Q:
Does it matter that all the BCS games, including the BCS Championship,
will be on ESPN in 2011?
A:
I’ve already suffered through one bowl season
without cable television in my lifetime.
And it was awful.
But the saving grace was the fact that
the big bowls were still within range of my
rabbit ears.
Now, I know that all the channels have
switched over to digital broadcasts and yada
yada yada, but this is an injustice.
What’s next? The NFL
Playoffs? The World Series?
ESPN is great for those slightly smaller Saturday matchups, and
for hardcore fans you can catch a random Purdue-Central Michigan matchup
on occasion. But for the BCS
Bowls this makes no sense.
You’re taking a great, primetime, network event and moving it to a
smaller channel. ABC, FOX,
and even CBS are all fine places to host these games, but now that ESPN
has gotten a hold of them, it’s minimizing the sport.
College football is not table tennis or dachshund racing or a
spelling bee. It’s a huge
sport. It belongs on a big
channel that is available to everyone.
Pretty soon these games will be a pay-per-view event sandwiched between
amateur boxing and whatever Ron Jeremy’s up to these days.
|
|
|
|
|
|