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For the time being, anyway. The Sinclair Broadcast Group, the controllers of my local ABC and FOX affiliates, has just agreed to an extension to the contract negotiation period with Time Warner. That means that I will be getting ABC and FOX until January 12, long enough to see the rest of the college bowl games this season. After that, who knows? At least by the time the contract finally expires I will be back at school.
And I don’t mean my bowl picks (not that they are doing great). Rather, I am referring to the first of the new year, when all cable subscribers in my area lose both ABC and FOX. That’s right, no ABC or FOX, two of the big broadcast networks, over cable even though we have affiliate stations just 30 miles away. This means that we will miss seven of the eleven bowl games that occur on or after January first, including the national championship game. Instead, we get to watch bowl games like the GMAC bowl, which pits Ohio University (9-4) versus Southern Mississippi University (8-5).
This whole problem stems from the recent acquisition of local cable provider Adelphia by Time Warner. The contract that Adelphia had with the company that controls the local ABC and FOX affiliates expires at the end of the year, meaning that Time Warner has to renegotiate. It ends up that, since Adelphia was small, the holding company actually provided the channels for free. However, since Time Warner has lots of money, the holding company has decided to make Time Warner pay for access to the channels. Time Warner refuses to do so because not only did the holding company previously offer the channels for free, but also because they can be had over the air for free.
Time Warner has admitted that it is very unlikely that the contract will be worked out by the new year, or even January 8th, the day of the national championship game. In fact, periodically on both ABC and FOX, they scroll a message across the screen (during scheduled programming) informing people that this channel will not be available starting January 1st and that you should switch to DirecTV or the Dish Network if you want to continue receiving the channels. Both satellite providers are also putting lots of advertisements up on the channels trying to get you to switch.
I really hope this situation is remedied quickly because the lack of ABC and FOX means that I am missing NFC football, college bowl games, 24, Lost, and House, just to name a few. It doesn’t help that broadcast antennas and satellite dishes (only the small types) must be well concealed in our neighborhood.
I just performed an initial move to a paginated view for the blog. Previously, all blog entries that I had ever written were on the same page, leading to a 240kb download. It got to the point where it seemed to kill Dreamweaver, so I was forced to fix it if I wanted to use Dreamweaver for spell checking. So, I now have split the blog among six pages, each having at the most 21 posts. I have added a rudimentary page browsing widget at the bottom of each blog page to help with navigation. Page 1 contains the oldest posts and page 6 the most recent. Feel free to email me if you think that this is counterintuitive or could be improved. Enjoy!
I never thought that I would see the day that I would be pulling for U of M to make it into the national championship game. Alas, that day has come. Now that USC has lost to UCLA and Florida has beaten Arkansas for the SEC championship, it looks like Florida might be the frontrunner for the opportunity to play OSU for the national championship. Heck, even the color guy who was doing the SEC championship game for CBS kept saying how much better Florida was than Michigan, even getting to the point of pulling out their schedules and comparing them side-by-side, a comparison that he said Florida won hands-down. (Chris is gonna love how he said how much better LSU was compared to Wisconsin. Don’t feel bad, I think Wisconsin could beat LSU too.)
It’s almost like no one is actually watching Florida play any of their games, even the TV announcers. They make claims about how good Florida is, but they look confused half of the time that they are on the field and it seems like they challenge themselves each week to see how quickly they can burn through their timeouts. For instance, today they burned through all of their second half timeouts before the six minute mark of the third quarter! Not only that, but Urban Meyer and his quarterback, Chris Leek, both seem to be unable to grasp the concept of clock management. Sure, they end up winning the game, but they sure as heck don’t deserve it. Also, I have never seen a team get so many bad penalties. Tonight, in a neutral stadium, they picked up at least five false start penalties and other stupid penalties.
Another point that the TV guys keep talking about is how Florida needs "style points" in order to get past Michigan. While I agree with this, they always go on to bring up the 2002 Ohio State team that won the national championship over The U (Miami University) while having a team that never won pretty the entire season. What they seem to forget was that we won all of our games that season. Florida lost to Auburn, and not by a little either. Please, stop comparing our team of destiny to this team of wannabes.
Michigan, on the other hand, only has a loss to OSU, the number one team in the nation. They also hold the credit of handing the only loss to Wisconsin, another top-ten team. In their loss to OSU, they looked much more impressive than Florida has looked all season, and this came against one of the best defenses in the nation. They have been impressive all season and are more than deserving to hold the number two spot, behind OSU.
I haven’t been looking forward to a rematch with Michigan, but at this point it would indeed be the best game that you could get. OSU would lay a Texas-sized smack down on Florida if they ended up as their opponent. USC would have been the ideal match up, but they went and screwed things up by losing to UCLA. At this rate, we will end up with a playoff, if only to just shut up Urban Meyer when he finds out how lacking his Gators really are compared to the top teams in the Big Ten.
You know what? I have a proposal. If Florida wants a go at OSU for the national championship, then they should have to go through Michigan first. When they get their butts handed to them by Michigan’s freshman class, then Michigan can bring out their first stringers for the real national championship game with OSU. Then the SEC and the rest of the country would be happy… Well, at least the rest of the country. The SEC would be too busy trying to reconnect with reality. (Yep, that’s right. SEC football is no better than any other conference. Just because you’re from down South where you can train outside year-round doesn’t automagically make you superior to everyone else in football. We grow athletes up in the Midwest too.)