Get ready for some vituperative invective, or move on to another post, because I am about to vent my spleen about the whole Big Ten Network Controversy.

Here is how the Big Ten is supposed to make money off college football (and basketball).  It’s not hard.  It’s not complex.  It’s not new.  It’s simple.  It has a proven track record of having worked for years.  You sell the right to broadcast your football games to the various broadcast networks and cable networks who want to show them.  Those broadcast and cable networks pay the Big Ten big money for the privilege, and then they sell sufficient advertising to cover the costs. 

This is the tried and true method.  This is the way it has always been done.  This is the way that has made the Big Ten a fortune over the past few years, and with the advent of more night games and even Thursday night games, and with spacing the BCS bowls out over four days instead of showing them all on January 1,  said fortune increaseth.

But that isn’t good enough for the Big Ten.  Nope.  They figure they have to expand beyond the college sports business and get into the business of creating and running their own cable channel, and then insisting that cable companies like Warner Cable (or whoever else) must carry that new channel, whether they want to or not.  They hold the Youngstown State and Akron games hostage, along with a bunch of other early season games from other Big Ten teams.

Why do we need this change?  Why do we need yet another channel on our cable system?  Because there is a prejudice against football and basketball among the higher up powers that be in the Big Ten.  Football and basketball are the two sports that make money.  Every other sport loses money.  Football and basketball make enough money not just to pay for themselves, but also make enough to pay for all of the other sports that few people care about, like gymnastics and field hockey and swimming.

But the busy bodies at the Big Ten can’t stand the fact that you aren’t interested in watching gymnastics and field hockey and lacrosse.  They can’t stand the fact that nobody comes to watch the women’s softball team’s games, and ESPN2 isn’t covering men’s volleyball.  So they figure if they have their own network, they can televise these sports and then… what… people will be forced to watch them?  Wrong. 

I will go out into my backyard and watch the grass grow before I watch a men’s or women’s lacrosse match.  I will spend an afternoon cleaning out the garage rather than watching OSU wrestling matches or swim meets.  I don’t care about that stuff.  I have nothing against these other sports.  I even play some of them.  I play golf, I played varsity tennis in high school, and I play soccer even now.  But while I like watching Tiger Woods take on Ernie Els, while I like watching Andy Roddick take on Roger Federer, and while I like watching Liverpool play Man U., I don’t enjoy their college equivalents.

It is the height of arrogant ignorance for a supplier of a product to attempt to dictate to the consumer what the consumer wants and the way that the consumer will get it.  This is the stuff that bankruptcies are made of. 

Some may say that it is the Big Ten’s product, and if they want to run themselves into the ground, lose viewership and revenue and fans, then that is their business and it is none of our buisness how they run theirs.  Were they IBM, GE, or Ford, I would agree.  But the Big Ten is made up of public universities, which are supported by our tax dollars.  Every dollar that is wasted on a stupid new channel showing sports programming that no one wants to see and every dollar that the Big Ten would have made off the old tried and true system but which under the new system these schools now have to live without, affects me.  It affects me because my tax dollars will have to make up the difference, and when I look to send my kid to college, the tuition is going to be higher because of it.

So three cheers for the arrogance of the Big Ten.  They don’t know crap about running a sports channel, but that won’t stop them from learning costly lessons on our dime.  Or maybe they will remain true to form and learn nothing at all. 

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