Notes from opening Saturday

Recovering from some of the bumbling mistakes Syracuse made that cost them a victory vs. Northwestern.  That late hit call was far from the only one.

* FSN went back to being...FSN.  The following season after Comcast and the Big Ten Network came to an agreement, FSN de-emphasized its brand nationally in favor of the "College Football Saturday" moniker.     Remember, FOX (via NewsCorp) owns 51% of BTN.  De-emphasizing the FSN name to get a channel carried might have been a concession.

FOX began to tout its name a little more last year with the addition of the F/X games and went full out yesterday, identifying all games with "CFB on FOX" and "FOX College Football" and the use of the FOX logo prominently. Coincidence?  I think not.  Now that Comcast's RSNs are gone, FSN can go back to being FSN.

* Dish Network and BTN came together for a short term agreement so that Dish subscribers could see the opening games.  The length of the short term agreement (those were the Big Ten Network's words) is unknown.

* Comcast did black out its C-USA coverage out of market.  I wasn't home and wasn't counting on it, but who would have been enforcing that blackout?  Maybe FOX since they're the primary rightsholder.  The CSS games are supposed to be regional.  Then again, Comcast's coverage of Towson at Kent St. was blacked out too.

* The ESPN3/WatchESPN changes continue to be a cluster.  As some have noted, the west coast can see many of the games early in the day.  Well, there's some fine print on the blackouts.  They start at 6pm LOCAL time for you, the viewer at home during the week & noon on the weekends.  Also, I think there was something odd going on with the 3:30pm ABC/ESPN2 slot.  I think I was able to get the Southern Miss-Nebraska game via ESPN3 even though it was on ABC.  Miami-BC was correctly blacked out on ESPN2.

* Many areas missed the first FOX College Football pregame show due to the length of the Cardinals-Nationals game.  FOX is in a bit of a bind.  They should be starting their MLB programming earlier if they wish to show the pregame.  On the flipside, while I know FOX has dumped out of MLB except for local markets in the event of a lengthy rain delay, I don't know what they can do for a long running game.  Starting MLB a half hour earlier would help, but in September they also run into issues with some of their affiliates carrying syndicated college football from the SEC and ACC.  I counted about 20 affiliates carrying Buffalo-Georgia and 15 carrying Elon-UNC, so they can't move the MLB coverage too far up in the day.

Might be time for FOX to create a dedicated web stream, either for the game or the pregame, for situations when things run long.