Andy Staples has an excellent long piece at SI.com. A key passage about the most recent events:
Later, when it came time to add a 14th school, SEC leaders took Missouri. Clemson or Florida State might have made more geographic sense, but they wouldn’t have opened any new television markets for the league. Missouri did. The SEC couldn’t tear up its contracts with ESPN and CBS, but adding so much earning power did give the league leverage to renegotiate.
The middle of the afternoon on Sept. 8, 2012, will have the following available on basic cable in Iowa. Most of these are nonconference and so fall under the home team’s contract:
- ABC/ESPN2 reverse mirror: Michigan-Air Force and USC-Syracuse
- NBC: Notre Dame-Purdue
- ESPN: Texas A&M-Florida
- Fox Sports: Kansas-Rice
- FX: Oregon State-Wisconsin
- Big Ten Network: Iowa-Iowa State
- NBC Sports (formerly Versus): Delaware-Delaware State
- ESPNU, which is not on expanded basic, has Central Michigan-Michigan State.
CBS won’t be showing football (probably golf) since it’s early in the season. I picked an early date because those TV times have been set. Later, when Notre Dame has afternoon home games, all three networks and all those flavors of ESPN and Fox will have games going on.
That is a lot of football. To get that, though, we’re all paying a price: cable/satellite subscriptions, football ticket price increases, athletics facilities arms races, and most visibly, ends to hundred-year-old series. Let’s hope that we don’t lose the things that make college football special — or at least not lose any more.