Dear college football fans, it's not all ESPN's fault

It’s the final weekend of college football’s regular season – better known as Championship Weekend – so that means we’re into our fifteenth (or sixteenth, if you count the one FCS game ESPN showed the weekend before the FBS teams got going) weekend of football.

I’ve seen about fifteen weeks’ worth of complaints about the state of television coverage of the game via ESPN Australia/New Zealand.

Yes, I understand at times ESPN shoot themselves in the foot and I’m their biggest critic. No network needs to show more than one replay of a game, and perhaps not any, given the advent of personal digital video records such as Foxtel’s IQ and the TiVo box.

Nor should ESPN schedule darts from 2009 in place of live football. That’s happened a few too many times next year, and it’s basically giving paying subscribers the middle finger.

All in all, ESPN is providing humongous serves of college football for fans down here. We’ve come a long way.

Compare it to when I first started following the game back in 2005, when we were lucky to get two games a week, and one was often a condensed replay, often pre-empted if some other live event ran long, as they are prone to doing.

My pet hate is seeing a tweet or a Facebook post saying “Why aren’t ESPN showing [insert game here] this week – they suck!” Or words to that affect.

Yes, in certain circumstances, ESPN does suck. This weekend, the culmination of conference championships, is an interesting example. The following major games are on the schedule.

1. SEC Championship – Alabama versus Missouri
2. Big Ten Championship – Wisconsin versus Ohio State
3. Pac-12 Championship – Arizona versus Oregon
4. Mountain West Championship – Boise State versus Fresno State
5. ACC Championship – Florida State versus Georgia Tech
6. Conference USA Championship – Marshall versus Louisiana Tech
7. Mid-American Conference Championship – Northern Illinois versus Bowling Green
8. And there’s Kansas State versus Baylor, a de facto Big XII conference decider

Going down that list, and comparing it to the ESPN Australia/New Zealand television guide, it appears that we’ll get to see only the ACC, C-USA and MAC championships.

That’s caused a giant amount of consternation among football fans here, and plenty of cursing in ESPN’s direction, because the Sunday schedule appears stacked with early-season college basketball games.

As I said, I’m the first to task ESPN to task for poor coverage, but the slate of games on offer this weekend really isn’t their fault.

Why? Let’s take a look at the broadcast rights in America for the above eight games.

1. SEC Championship – CBS
2. Big Ten Championship – FOX
3. Pac-12 Championship – FOX
4. Mountain West Championship – CBS
5. ACC Championship – ESPN/ABC
6. Conference USA Championship – ESPN
7. Mid-American Conference Championship – ESPN
8. Kansas State versus Baylor – ESPN

See that?

Notice how many SEC on CBS games ESPN has broadcast here this year? None. Same goes with Big Ten and Pac-12 games originating from FOX. I’m sure that ESPN would like to show them, it’s just that, contractually, they can’t.

People are apparently labouring under the misapprehension that ESPN can broadcast any game that’s being shown in America. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Rights for the various conferences – and teams, if you’re talking independents like Notre Dame and Brigham Young – are incredibly complicated.

Just because FOX Sports has expanded its channel offering here doesn’t mean that they can automatically and suddenly up and decide to broadcast the Pac-12 and Big Ten championship games this weekend. Although the two networks, ours and America’s, are corporate cousins, these broadcast rights are tied into the conferences, and there’s an unimaginable amount of red tape to cut through.

For what I’m guessing are negligible ratings here – let’s face it, the sport has a limited following at college level – it probably isn’t worth their effort trying to fight through said red tape. Indeed, ratings are most likely the reason why we haven’t seen any Fox games from America appearing on Fox Sports here.

Hopefully this goes some way to explaining that, no, ESPN aren’t deliberately trying to give us college football fans the you-know-what’s by scheduling what you would argue are the least interesting games of the weekend. They’re simply broadcasting what they’re allowed to.

The ratings gold that college football has become in America has, to a large extent, taken away ESPN’s broadcasting monopoly. Yes, the so-called Worldwide Leader has a piece of just about every conference, they no longer have access to the best and biggest SEC games, which belong to CBS, and most of the biggest Pac-12 and Big Ten games, which rest with FOX.

I guess Australian fans have been disadvantaged by the sudden surge in popularity. Remember, FOX is a recent arrival to regular college football broadcasting. Before then, ABC and ESPN had a wider array of top-level games to choose from. Alas, this weekend we’ll have to be content with the ACC, MAC and C-USA title deciders.

That’s why we’re watching meaningless college basketball tournament games for most of this weekend!

The good news is that ESPN does enjoy a monopoly over the majority of the upcoming Bowl games, including most of the big ones, so it should be a fun late December/early January!

Enjoy Championship Weekend!