This weekend’s slate of college football games is, quite frankly, terrible. There are only three matchups between two ranked teams. The featured game on CBS this weekend fits a 6-4 Missouri team against a 5-5 Tennessee squad. Fox is actually choosing to air games featuring a 3-7 Nebraska team and a 3-7 Kansas side, while ABC is giving the national spotlight to 5-5 Maryland and 5-5 Oklahoma State against teams with higher aspirations.
The three “good” games between two ranked teams are all airing on different networks, though two are in the same timeslot, which sucks. At 2:30 PM, #12 Syracuse plays #3 Notre Dame at Yankee Stadium. At 8 PM, in the day’s featured window on ABC, #24 Cincinnati takes on #11 UCF in Orlando.
And then there’s the third game, also airing at 8 PM. It features #16 Iowa State and #15 Texas, and airs on…Longhorn Network.
ESPN actually released a guide on where to watch the game (which is wild to see in 2018), and it’s pretty sad – the only over the top streaming services that carry LHN are DirecTV Now (in select markets only, apparently) and PlayStation Vue (if you pay the additional $10 for the sports package). A bunch of Dish Network packages carry it, and it’s also available on DirecTV’s sports pack. A bunch of cable companies also carry Longhorn Network, but again, whether or not you get it depends on your market – I live in southern California and pay approximately $Texas for my Cox cable bundle each month, and it’s not offered on any tier.
So that’s where we are in 2018 – Longhorn Network actually has a good Texas football game instead of a terrible Texas football game, and that’s arguably a bad thing because of how poor this Saturday’s schedule is.
But hey, I guess that’s good news for Cincinnati-UCF, Duke-Clemson, and uh…Kansas-Oklahoma, right? This might be a good Saturday night to not worry about college football instead of stressing yourself out trying to figure out how you can watch Longhorn Network for one of the handful of times each year you need to.
[ESPN]
