Apologies to the Big Ten Network

Earlier in the week, I said that I was having difficulty finding the Towson-Northwestern game on my cable box, even though I was able to find every other game possible. 

Well, since then, my TV box has apparently updated, and the game has appeared on upcoming schedule, tomorrow at noon, listed under "Big Ten Football". I'm sorry for the widespread panic I probably caused, and for underestimating the Big Ten Network. For all its faults, the BTN really is a great resource for fans of the conference's 11 schools. They outcover pretty much everybody, and they make it possible for a fan of a school with 8,000 kids in Illinois living in New York to watch their school's silly little cupcake home opener. And if that wasn't enough, apparently, all those Rotel queso ads absolutely rake in cash for the schools. (My personal favorite ads on the BTN are the ones for Solo cups, as if college students hadn't heard.)

That being said, I'm not going to pay money to get a channel that I'll get in my dorm room for free in two weeks, also, I'd rather watch the game in a sports bar with, you know, other people, than in my own room. 

Trifecta of Doom: Towson, the Big Ten Network, and Northwestern being Northwestern.

Title ominous enough for you?

Anyway, I know it's messed up to complain about Northwestern's television situation: I'd think I lost the right to do so after watching the NU-UC Riverside game on an airplane. (I also once watched an inning of NU softball on a plane.) But today, I gotta gripe.

Basically, a perfect storm of Northwestern being Northwestern events are conspiring to make it really, really difficult for me to watch Saturday's game vs. Towson.

The first, and simplest reason, is that college football starts September 5th, and Northwestern, unlike most schools in the country, is on the quarter system, meaning we start about 3-4 weeks after every other school in the country, and well into the swing of the football season. The problem here is that I live about 800 miles away in New York City, meaning I won't be going to this game or the EMU game. This is just one of those sort of annoying things about NU football: we get 2-3 games every year with essentially no student section, which means our attendence isa bout 3-4000 lower than it should be. 

But how to watch the game in New York? If you're not living in the states that contain Big Ten schools, it's already sort of hard to get the Big Ten Network - you have to pay to get that station, plus a bunch of other channels you don't particularly care about - and the cost of this and the fact that it will come in handy for maybe two games a year make this an unappealing option. 

However, even if I did have the network, a quick glance at the TV schedule for next Saturday on Time Warner Cable shows that with a ridiculous 7 Big Ten games beginning at noon ET, NU gets the short end of the stick: Ohio State and Minnesota will be getting the ESPN and ESPN2 slots, while MSU, Purdue, Iowa, and Penn State get the Big Ten Network and three overflow channels, while the Towson vs. Northwestern game doesn't air live, instead getting shown at 6 PM the next day. If this information is incorrect, somebody tell me, but my cable box and the Time Warner website appear to verify this. I wouldn't be surprised: last year, NU vs. Duke was the only football game containing a Big Ten team that didn't get televised. I presume watching the game is easier in Big Ten country, but that's the problem with going to a school 800 miles from home.

It certainly doesn't help that a) we're Northwestern, the school with the smallest fanbase and the least regionally centered one, thus making airing the game anywhere unappealing and b) the fact that we're playing Towson, a team that struggles against FCS opponents, thus making the game completely unwatchable for anyone who isn't an NU fan. 

Also, the fact that NU's fanbase is so diluted makes it difficult to make a large gathering of NU fans anywhere. Therefore, while the Buckeyes and every other college in the world has a well-established NYC bar, I've only heard rumors that there's a place like that in New York, and I've never actually met anybody who's been there. (If any of you can give word on whether that place is, in fact, an actual place, please, I'm desperate over here.)

Personally, I plan on gathering the NYC NU crew together at a sports bar where I watched the SIU game last year, but any suggestions about places to watch the game in New York are appreciated. 

Long story short, the fact that we're Northwestern and we're playing Towson makes it sort of difficult to find Saturday's game for a large percentage of our already small fanbase. And that's not good for anybody. 

There won't be any game thread - first off, if you live within two hours of the school or so, you should be at the game. Second off, I see no way I can bring a computer to wherever I watch the game, and third, blogger isn't to conducive to game threads. 

However, hypothetically, if, let's say, I don't know, my blog gets picked up by a large sports blog network that currently has a blog for every Big Ten team besides Northwestern about 2-3 weeks from now (COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH), I'll post a game thread for every game, and I'll need you guys to help make them actually interesting. So, hypothetically, be prepared. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

The OOC

Remember sunday, when I said I'd post every single day until football season? I meant it, but I probably should've put a caveat saying "except days when I inexplicably don't have internet access." Anyway, crisis resolved, there'll be two today and one every day from here on out. 

So I was on a Jetblue plane today, watching a mixture of a four month old Barca-Madrid game that I already knew the final outcome to and Animal Planet. (What happened to the Big Ten Network! I DEMAND TO WATCH INDIANA WOMEN'S VOLLEYBALL DURING MY FLIGHTS) There was a horrible, horrible point during the flight where both these events managed to be on commercial, and I had to watch SportsCenter, where I saw that Greg Paulus will be Syracuse's starter this season. Which got me thinking about how winnable the Syracuse game is. Which got me realizing that of our four out-of-conference games this year, quite possibly our most difficult one could be against a team we handily beat last season with a new head coach, a quarterback who met his receivers three months ago for the first time and is more used to running away from dunkers than running an offense. 

Last year, NU won swept its out-of-conference schedule for the first time since 1962, and this year, we face four opponents who we should beat handily. None had winning records last season, and all four have brand new head coaches who have never been D-I head coaches before. For the first time in a long time, even dropping a single out-of-conference game will be a major disappointment for the Wildcats. 

This isn't necessarily the best way this year's schedule could've turned out. First of all, there's the fact that no matter how well we do this year, people will point to our 4-0 out-of-conference schedule and say that we didn't beat any real competition. Next, there's the fact that this year, we don't really need the cupcakes - we have a plus defensive unit with players with NFL talent and a lightning-rod quarterback who can make legit D-I teams look silly. Next year, our squad might be a drop-off from this year, and we'll have to play an SEC troublemaker in Vanderbilt and an improving Rice squad. Without a clear heir to Kafka's job and with guys like Wooton, McManis, Phillips, and Smith leaving Evanston, we might need four out-of-conference wins to be bowl eligible, and we might not be able to get them. 

This year, our bowl eligibility shouldn't be an issue. We should get four wins out of Towson at home, EMU at home, 'Cuse on the road, and Miami (OH) at home, leaving us to only need two (realistically three) to go someplace warm for the winter. And to be honest, if we don't get four wins out of those four games, we probably don't deserve the vacation. 

The Bestest Present Ever!

Tomorrow's gonna be my real-life birfday, and, knowing me as well as they do, the Big Ten Network got me something even better than anything Jeremih could give me: a day of all NU programming, which will start at 5:00 this morning and will go until 5:00 tomorrow morning.

Of course, like everything else the Big Ten Network does, there's no way I can watch it, I don't know where I could, and quite frankly, even if I knew, I probably wouldn't, because I have better things to do than watch poorly produced repeats of collegiate sports programming, plus the fact that a network completely dedicated solely to airing the goings on of a collegiate athletic conference might be the stupidest idea in the history of ideas. But, hey, 24 hours of NU sports! Get ready!

So this is what's on tap for NU Day on the BTN: Highlights include this years' MSU game, the 1995 Penn State game, the MSU game from two years ago, the 2000 Michigan game, Michael Jenkins' game winner against Iowa, some women's tennis, and, for some reason, the first half of this relatively unimportant softball doubleheader I got to cover.

So, check it out. I personally will be doing more interesting things, but if this floats your boat, more power to you, check it out. And if you can't, well, great news: this is only the second of three times that the BTN will be doing this this summer. It's almost like they're running out of things to show, but that can't possibly be true, considering the athletic happenings of 11 universities is certainly worthy of 365 days of 24 hour programming every year.