We in ACC land can be a little sensitive about ESPN’s college sports coverage. I don’t think I have to go into a lot of detail about ESPN’s perceived SEC Football Bias, but sometimes you have to give some credit to the 4 Letter Network. For the ACC that time, I believe is this week.
The ACC Tourney has been all over ESPN and ESPN2 since the start of the tournament on Tuesday. Every single ACC Tournament game has been on ESPN or ESPN2. Those are ESPN’s two biggest channels. In addition, Friday’s semi-finals are in prime time, as is Saturday’s Championship game. Guess where ESPN Gameday will be this weekend? Yes the ACC tournament…
That’s tremendous exposure for the conference and it’s teams. By comparison the Big 12 had 4 of it’s games on ESPNU, and is the leadin championship game to the ACC’s Championship game.
The Big 10 has a mixture of ESPN/ESPN2/CBS and the BTN. I prefer the continuity of the ESPN format myself.
The Pac 12 has cost itself a tremendous amount of exposure, by placing so many of it’s games on the Pac 12 Network.
Lastly let’s look at the SEC… The SEC Tournament is being shown on the SEC Network all they way up through it’s Semi-Finals.
Now it’s understandable that the conferences with their own networks would show specifically early round games on their conference networlk, and I would expect the same if the ACC had their own network on ESPN. That said though, the ACC would still receive the bulk of ESPN coverage during conference tournament season. The ACC is getting the best time slots, even against the other conference games that appear on ESPN or ESPN2.
So ACC fans, bristle at ESPN during football season, but the network knows who is paying the bills during basketball season.
Just take at ESPN’s summary of their 36th basketball… How many of their top games featured ACC teams, and how many of their top markets were ACC ones.
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