The TV Media Scorpion Stings Again

On the state of play in CFB & where we go from here

When the college football world began its descent into madness in the days after the pandemic decimated America at large, much ado was made about the need for greener televised pastures in Tinseltown.

That 2022 decision by a horde of money-hungry cowards from Los Angeles and inside the Big Ten’s fortress in Rosemont (think O’Hare and keep digging) send shockwaves across the sport.

Those shockwaves are still being felt in locales ranging from Seattle to Statesboro, as the Pac-12 crumbled like the San Andreas Fault in a bad horror film under the duress placed upon it by an imbecile of a commissioner and a room full of gaslighting from the leadership corp (or lack thereof).

The rationale behind the wave of mutilation along the Left Coast was the need for that oh, so sweet TV dollar, with the Pac-12’s deal with ESPN falling apart and the liferaft from Apple TV not delivering enough slop for the troughs.

The thought (if you can parse one out) was that the defecting 10 from the OG Pac-12 to the pastures of the Big Ten, Big 12 and (most comical of them all) Atlantic Coast Conference would keep those schools afloat, while giving their fans bountiful access to watch their beloved teams after years on the sport’s periphery.

The Scorpion & The Frog

There’s an old adage that’s been beat to death over the years about the scorpion and the frog, which I’m sure you’ve heard ad nauseum in the past.

TL;DR: A scorpion needs a lift across a river and a friendly frog offers passage, but dies after getting stung by the pest. When the frog incredulously asks him why he stung him, the scorpion basically quips, ‘What did you expect? I’m a scorpion you moron.”

That axiom comes to mind when I think about the current state of amateur football, as those same athletic directors, presidents and chancellors that sealed the Pac-12’s fate in recent years were served a scalding piece of humble pie in recent weeks.

That pie a la mode was the two-headed monster that was Comcast’s measuring contest with FOX, which led the bloated cable behemoth to pull the Big Ten Network from its myriad of cable packages in the Northwest.

The issue at play in that dispute is Comcast’s reticence to move the B1G network to a basic cable tiered package, forcing UW and Oregon fans to get creative when it comes to watching the teams they care most about.

So much for that visibility, I suppose, though that rumble looks like a shouting match in comparison to the battle royal that’s reached its apex between the nation’s largest satellite TV company and the Four-Letter Network.

That DirecTV-Disney clash began earlier this month, when the satellite mainstay pulled everything from ESPN and its sister channels (ABC included) to the company’s eponymous cable kids station over the contract between the two sides.

The blackout began in the lead-up to USC’s thrilling win in Sin City over LSU, serving as a fitting reminder that greener pastures aren’t always sprucy when there’s money on the line.

While no one knows exactly how long either carriage dispute will drag on, it sure seems like DirecTV is ready to wait out their mouse-eared rivals, based on the war of words coming from the company’s CFO, Ray Carpenter.

"[Customers] are forced to buy these big, bloated packages to watch the Disney Channel. This leads to a higher cost and a lower value quotient," Carpenter said. 

While there’s plenty of animus and axes to grind on both sides of the aisle here, the current pissing contest being waged between camps like Comcast and DirecTV on one side and the Big Ten/FOX and Disney on the other should serve as a cautionary tale for college leaders in the year of our lord 2024.

That’s because the so-called “slam dunk” of abandoning a gamble in your old conference digs for the glamor and glitz of cable TV isn’t all its cracked up to be.

Whether it’s due to a contract dispute or the economical greed that comes from placing your team’s games on streaming services to force millions to spring for $20 a month to watch their respective alma maters struggle at home against NAU or Idaho, the scorpion has already laid claim to its latest victim.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, my friends, as college thought leaders realize that the deals they signed with the likes of ESPN (owned by Disney), NBC (owned by Comcast) and FOX (owned by the devil with a bad accent, Rupert Murdoch) aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

But hey, at least we’ll never have to dig through Google to find the channel listing for the Pac-12 Network. Those were the days, amirite?