A Rant: The Month In Sports Television

By Allen Bacon, Editor, The Daily Bosco

I'm going to be really upfront here. I'm going to go on a rant about this month's sports television programming and I'm not sure where it is going to lead. So you might want to pull the women and children off the street first before I begin.

Today I wanted to watch one of my favorite events, The NHL All Star game on television. This is until I found out that it is on a station called Versus and I can't get Versus because it is not part of my paid services through my cable television provider. This is not right. This event always used to be on a broadcast channel and I could always get it for free.

This was the same for the BCS Bowl games this past month. I don't get ESPN currently. I don't want to pay for something that already has paid advertising for it. That's just not right in my mind. The networks are already getting paid by advertisers which we in an indirect way pay for anyway when we buy the advertised products and then we have to pay again for the "privilege" to watch? No thanks.

And before I go storming off into the sunset, let me say this about the NFL Pro Bowl or more precisely let me ask some pertinent questions. Like, why would you play an All-Star game without members from two of your best teams (the Super Bowl teams; Pittsburgh and Green Bay). Isn't that like not being able to see any New York Yankees or Los Angeles Lakers in the MLB or NBA All Star games respectively. Or, why can't they actually play the Pro Bowl game in the middle of the season like all the other major professional leagues?

Or, why do you almost always play the game in Hawaii. I say play the game in the middle of the season in the park of the previous Super Bowl champion and return to Hawaii every so often. And I say mix up the teams...not always AFC-NFC. Sometimes you would have North vs. South or East vs. West or CFL vs. NFL...stuff like that.

I miss the good old days when all the Bowl games, the NHL All Star game and everything else was on broadcast television free. The only question then was whose house were we going to go to watch the game. I guess there wasn't a Pro Bowl back then either, which wasn't such a bad idea now that I think about it.