Bad Night To Be A One TV House - College Basketball Fans Are Losing Their Damn Minds Over Being Forced To Stream No. 5 Marquette vs No. 6 Iowa State
Bad night to be a one TV household like Bosco says. Look at this slate:
Ohio State/Maryland - 6:30pm (BTN)
Baylor at UConn - 630pm (FS1)
Alabama at UNC - 7:15pm (ESPN)
Virginia at Florida - 7:15pm (ESPN2)
Marquette at Iowa State - 8pm (ESPN+)
Kansas at Creighton - 8:30pm (FS1)
Auburn at Duke - 9:15pm (ESPN)
Pitt at Mississippi State - 9:15pm (SECN)
Texas at NC State - 9:15pm (ESPN2)
Loaded. But what do you notice there? Oh a game between two top-6 teams in the AP poll is on ESPN+. People are freaking out about it - see the above tweets. It's insanely stupid, but also was guaranteed to happen. The Big 12 signed a deal with ESPN+ to broadcast games. This is what happens when you sign a deal with a streaming portion. The fans get screwed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled that we live in a world where every game is now somewhere to watch. Sure, it's expensive. Sure, it doesn't make sense. And it's damn sure annoying as hell to have to figure out what channel a game is on when it's not on cable. You gotta go to all your apps, hope it loads right and then leave it there. You can't hop around channels or anything like that. That's the biggest downfall to streaming. I want to be able to bounce around at commercials on TV2 or halftime of TV3. Give me as many screens and multiviews as possible to watch as many games as possible at once.
I'm gonna go the other way though. I'm not going to complain about it. We all have a login at this stage. We all know that games are going to be on streaming with Peacock getting a deal and ESPN+ getting a deal. It wasn't that long ago that we didn't have options to watch these games. Whatever was on ESPN/ESPN2/ESPNU was our only hope. Hell, there was a time I lived like a king because my parents had the DirecTV package to get every NCAA Tournament game. Remember those days? You were stuck watching one game on CBS and no way out.
I get it though. This is where college basketball is stupid. These games, times, networks are all decided fairly early and set in stone. They never adapt when this should be on a major network so I don't have to explain to my dad how to watch this game. Or wait until tomorrow when he's confused that this game happened and saw 0 minutes of it. It's early on but this college basketball season is delivering. We have upsets, we have fights on planes, we had one of the best and memorable Feast Week's in recent memory. Now you have another top-10 game and people are complaining.