By R.L. Bynum
The frustration of watching North Carolina fall behind by 20 points at Cal on Saturday wasn’t the only maddening experience for Tar Heels fans on Saturday.
ESPN’s insistence on scheduling college basketball games for two-hour windows frequently forces fans to either switch to another channel, go to ESPN3 online, or use the ESPN app to see the beginning of games.
In a common scheduling model, the Boston College-Syracuse broadcast started at 2 p.m. Saturday on ACC Network, with the UNC-Cal broadcast scheduled to start at 4 p.m. on that channel.
When the BC-Syracuse game extended past 4 p.m., fans were told they could stream the Tar Heels’ game on the ESPN app. ESPN couldn’t start the game on another channel due to a packed Saturday schedule.
That didn’t work, leaving UNC fans with the Tar Heel Sports Network radio call as the best way to follow the game.
Fans vented their frustrations on social media, including dozens of replies to a tweet from the official UNC men’s basketball X account saying that the game was streaming on ACC Network Extra. It wasn’t UNC’s fault; it was just relaying what ESPN told them.
While you could stream other games, doing so for UNC-Cal wasn’t even an option, as the image tweeted in one of the replies showed. Well after the UNC-Cal game had begun, instead of a stream of the game, fans could only see screens that suggested that “this event has not yet started.”
ESPN said that it wasn’t supposed to happen that way.
“We are aware of a technical issue that affected access to the start of Saturday’s UNC-Cal game on the ESPN App,” an ESPN spokesman said in a statement to Tar Heel Tribune. “The situation is under review, and we apologize for the inconvenience.”
Because of the issue, by the time Boston College finished off its 81–73 overtime victory over Syracuse, it was 4:33 p.m., and the UNC-Cal game had reached the first half under-eight TV timeout.
When fans could finally watch the game, 6:51 remained in the first half, and Cal led 31–24. They couldn’t see how the game got to that point because they missed more than the first 13 minutes of the game.
The problem of one sporting event overlapping the broadcast window of another game or program has persisted for decades.
Older Carolina fans will vividly remember No. 15 North Carolina’s 75–70 win on Feb. 10, 1985, at LSU, which aired on ESPN. Well, at least some of it aired.
The win was memorable, but it stands out because a professional men’s tennis match that preceded UNC’s game on ESPN went long. Without the channel or streaming options of today, fans couldn’t watch the game until well into the second half, when ESPN finally switched to the UNC-LSU game.
The streaming options usually work these days, and ESPN often starts a game on ESPN News (or other channels) until the preceding game concludes.
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A better option would be for ESPN’s channels, including the ACC Network and SEC Network, to adopt the 2-hour, 15-minute broadcast windows used by The CW for its doubleheaders. It doesn’t guarantee that the first game won’t go past that window, but it increases the chance that it finishes within it.
ESPN suggested that sticking to two-hour windows was about scheduling flexibility. It must schedule multiple games, unlike The CW.
But ESPN could work with its conference partners to set up, for example, a weeknight tripleheader with games at 7 p.m., 9:15 and 11:30 (or 6:45, 9 p.m. and 11:15). Multiple weekend games could start at 11:30 a.m., 1:45 p.m., 4, 6:15, 8:30 and 10:45.
In both scenarios, one game forcing fans of teams in the following game to find the stream (or switch to another channel) for the start of their game would be less likely.
With better scheduling, scenarios like the one that played out on Saturday would be much less common. Glitches wouldn’t ruin the experience for fans watching at home.
Not having Carolina fall behind by 20 points? That’s another matter entirely.
Photo courtesy of UNC Athletics
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