1.01.2007

Bowl Season

New year, same problems:

It is very difficult to enjoy college sports, as the NCAA has decided that some of the games worth watching should come on at the same time. New year's day featured two games I really wanted to watch, West Virginia vs. Georgia Tech, and Arkansas vs Wisconsin. The games were running at the very same time, making it impossible to enjoy both. Having a television with Picture in Picture is nice, and helped greatly, but when push comes to shove, I end up missing the big plays from both games.

The irony is that the teams who no one really cares about all run solo. So the GMAC bowl and the Poppajohns.com bowl will be the only bowl game on when they air, but when two games both with ranked teams play, they are on at the exact same time. Who schedules this stuff?

What is even worse is how New Jerseyans got screwed royally. The best season Rutgers has had in decades, and we can't see the game, because it is on the NFL Network. This is ridiculous. The NFL Network is trying to get carried by basic cable services, but the price they are asking for is too high. Their solution is to steadily piss off football fans so that we call our local cable operators and demand the network. It is a rather ugly method, and will only lead to later bad relations, but that's not the issue. NCAA, why couldn't you the GMAC Bowl on the NFL Network? Sure, Rutgers should be good again next year, but let's not waste a 10+ win team's bowl game on a network that is run by the league that takes away the NCAA's top talent a year or more too early. (An issue that needs to be address in another entry)

But it could be worse, much worse. March Madness, the time of year where the words pool, bracket, sleeper, and underdog are used most frequently, features by far the worst television package ever. One channel - and in my area the one with by far the worst picture - is selected to carry all the games for the 65 team tournament. Luckily, the NCAA realized that it was a waste to not have some way for all the games to be watched, and now I can watch them streaming online. So I have two choices: watch the feature game in my area on fuzzy CBS, or watch any other game in choppy online video.

NCAA - Amateur athletes, amateur programming scheduling.

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