College Football Saturdays Are SO MUCH Better Without ESPN

Hold your phone over heat (or just highlight the words) to reveal the secret invisible paragraph text below. This paragraph is for non-Disney executive eyes only. If you try to access this next paragraph as an employee of Disney, your device will explode. If you are a Disney executive, or have any say in their decision making whatsoever, this blog does not start until after the GIF of Scrooge McDuck diving into his pool of gold coins. Which is literally you right now. 

This is how we win, guys. This is how we get our sports back. Not by signing a Change.com petition. Not by going to KeepMyNetworks.com and contacting our provider directly. Not by skull fucking @ESPN and @YouTubeTV on Twitter. The only thing that does is further show Disney how much we rely on their networks. How much we desperately want need ESPN to live our lives. The way we win is by showing Disney that we don't need ESPN to watch sports. That without ESPN, we've found that we're better off. In reality, do I actually think football is better without ESPN?...... Yes. Of course I do. And so do you.

(Well fuck I guess the invisible ink trick isn't going to work on a phone anyways... never mind that bit)

Unless you've been living under a rock (which is probably a pretty good healthy life because you aren't concerned with what's on your TV screen on a Saturday afternoon) you know that YouTubeTV & Disney are in a carriage dispute – a disagreement over the right to "carry", that is, retransmit, a broadcaster's signal. Since Thursday, October 30th, Disney has pulled ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPNews, ACC Network, SEC Network, ESPN 8: The Ocho, all of their channels, from YouTubeTV. Mickey Mouse took his ball and went home. Until Disney and Alphabet Inc. (the parent company of Google, who purchased YouTube for $1.65B in 2006) come to an agreement, YouTubeTV subscribers who wish to watch any network owned by Disney are shit out of luck. 

Fans of all sports have voiced their displeasure. Probably none more so than college football fans. At any given time on a Saturday afternoon, there could be as many as 7 (I think) college football games that should be available to YouTube TV subscribers, but thanks to corporate greed, have been taken away. Games on channels that were promised to us when we agreed to pay $35/month for their service back in 2017, and continued being promised to us as they raised their prices by $10/month year after year, after year, after year, after year.

It's now been two college football weekends since Disney pulled their channels. The first weekend, I'll admit, I was upset. I wanted my 4 games on multi-view on the big TV. I wanted at least 3 more games on my laptop. I wanted the very set up I've been accustomed to having on college football Saturday for the past so many years. 

But I had an epiphany this Saturday. I've finally seen the light. For whatever reason (probably laziness) I decided that I wasn't going to bother with any illegal streams. I wasn't going to bother finding a bar with a cable package where I could watch all the games at once. I certainly wasn't going to cave, and go through the hassle of rearranging my subscriptions to get the $30/month Disney+, Hulu, ESPN bundle. Which is likely the whole reason this stupid dispute is happening in the first place. I decided to simply focus on the best game YouTubeTV had available, and watch it from start to finish. Something I haven't done on a regular season college football Saturday in years. And let me tell you, it was delightful. 

At 12pm EST, we had Big Noon Kickoff on FOX. The #2 Indiana Hoosiers vs the pre-season #2 Penn State Nittany Lions. A matchup of the titans. NFL prospects all over the field. A game with massive Big Ten Championship & CFB Playoff implications for 50% of the teams involved. Sure, the first half was a little sleepy. Even with Indiana getting off to a sluggish start, Penn State appeared to be overmatched. With Indiana leading 17-7 heading into the second half, I thought we were in for another typical Hoosiers football thumping. But boy was I wrong. What a second half of football. What a final drive by Indiana. Marched the ball right down the field on the #6 ranked recruiting class in the nation of 2022. All but sealing the Heisman Trophy for one Fernando Mendoza.    

Of course, in a world where I wasn't already an Indiana fan, I'd have still turned my focus to that game by the start of the 4th quarter. But would that drive have hit the same had I not been locked-in on the game since the opening kickoff? Had I not watched Indiana slowly crumble under the pressure of an opponent with nothing to lose. Had I not watched that crowd of 105,000+ downtrodden Penn State fans slowly come to life and realize that they just might, even if only for an afternoon, have something to cheer for. Only to have wide receiver Omar Cooper Jr. defy multiple laws of physics and rip their hearts out with one of the greatest game-winning catches you'll ever see. If ESPN was an option, and I hadn't been consuming a full TV's worth of Indiana-Penn State from start to finish, that final drive would never have hit the same. 

Then, immediately following that perfect college football watching experience, it was time for #9 Oregon @ #20 Iowa on CBS. And what a treat that was. Had Auburn-Vanderbilt been available to me. Along with Texas A&M-Missouri. Oregon-Iowa probably would have been relegated to the corner of my screen. Likely without sound. But instead, I took 58" inches of Iowa football up the ass for 3 and a half hours. And I liked it. The Iowa Hawkeye football experience is an experience like no other. It's a brand of football that's all but extinct in the modern age. In a college football world where every game available, it's a brand of football you would probably never pick to watch out of a lineup. But with ESPN out of the picture, the choice was made for me. Iowa football had me electrified. I was alone on my couch hollering for 6-yard HB dives in a cloud of dust. When Iowa QB Mark Gronowski, who EXPLODED Saturday with a 10-for-18 138-yard passing performance, hit white wide receiver D.J. Vonnahme for 40-yards over the middle… on 3rd & 5 with their backs to the end zone… and proceeded to lead the Hawkeyes on a 93-yard touchdown drive late in the 4th quarter. To take a 16-15 lead. In the cold and the rain. After experiencing the build-up to that moment, I could feel the Iowa football coursing through my veins. Even though Iowa lost in the end, watching that slobberknocker of a Big Ten football game in Kinnick Stadium from start to finish gave me a feeling I NEVER would have felt, and an appreciation for that game I never would have had, if ESPN's selfishness hadn't forced my hand.

And in the evening… the college football games available to me kinda stunk. To be honest, I don't even remember what they were. Because instead of watching bad football, I spent some quality time with my wife. And I didn't feel a hint of FOMO over it. The lack of ESPN has helped me realize there are sometimes more important things in life than watching sports. I've come to realize that the lack of ESPN might be the best thing that's ever happened to me. If there ever comes a time where the games available on FOX and CBS aren't that great, maybe that's just a sign from the universe that we should be doing something else. Like watching a random movie with a loved one about a hot murderous sex robot. 

Everybody in my family, myself included, went to bed happy on Saturday night. Vibes were at an all-time high in the Rich household. All things considered, not only was this past Saturday the most enjoyable college football watching Saturday I've had all season, it was the overall most enjoyable Saturday I've had all year long. A Saturday that NEVER would have been possible if ESPN was available on my streaming platform of choice. 

Now you're probably thinking, "If you had ESPN, you could still focus on any one single football game from start to finish. You'd just have more good ones to choose from. You could still be fucking adult with the self-control to know when to stop watching sports and pay attention to your fucking wife for 5 minutes for the betterment of your marriage."

To that I say… no. Shut up. I am not a man of self-control. I'm a man of abundance. If I am given multiple options, I will exercise all of them. Sometimes you need to be saved from yourself. Thank god ABC and ESPN are off my TV. Because if they ever do come back… it's all over. The minute Disney's networks return to YouTubeTV, I'll be ESPN #1 customer once again. I'll be eye balls deep in SEC and ACC football games I don't care about on 8 mini-screens until long after I'm divorced. But thankfully, that's not the world we live in anymore. ESPN is off YouTube TV, and the world is a better place for it. 

So thank you, ESPN. We've loved you for decades. I still think you're absolutely remarkable. But were good now. You can go. You don't have to. You can hang around if you want. But we don't need you on YouTubeTV anymore.