SEC/ESPN deal has much to prove

Nine months ago, the Southeastern Conference and ESPN agreed on a $2.25 billion media deal promising coverage of anything donning the conference seal. Nine months in, the deal has underperformed.

Across a number of media platforms, the Worldwide Leader has without a doubt raised the profile of football and basketball across the South.

That’s it, though.

The inherent problem with ESPN promising so much coverage is it can’t all go on the flagship station or even ESPN2. If an ESPN crew is going to cover an SEC early-season baseball game in the middle of basketball season, how deep into your cable company’s sports package will you have to dig to watch?

By the time you get down to watching games live on ESPN Classic, something doesn’t feel right. Even during football and basketball season, the deal didn’t perform. Games were aired on networks Insight employees weren’t sure how to access.

The SEC Network didn’t offer a marked improvement in production quality and the on-air talent was, to say the least, a major step down from all-world hoops tandem Tom Hammond and Larry Conley.

But in the other areas, what has the deal done? What about the Olympic sports?

According to the joint news release the league and ESPN sent last August, ESPN and ESPN2 would televise: at least three regular-season baseball or softball matches, three regular-season gymnastics matches and the conference championships in those three sports.

During the gymnastics conference championships, ESPN went with an MLS game. and ESPN2 had Sweet 16-round NCAA women’s basketball tournament games.

The heart of the deal is in football and basketball. But by the time ESPN gets past its priority programming — Alabama and Florida football, and UK basketball — you may be stuck watching your favorite team play on ESPNU, with second-rate production quality and commercials for muffin pans.

And we’re in for 14 more years of this. By the end of this thing, we may be spurning college baseball programming just so we can watch third-round coverage of all 16 SEC teams playing in the 180-team NCAA Tournament, broadcast in 3D.

Whatever it is we’re watching at that point, it still won’t be gymnastics.

James Pennington is a journalism senior. E-mail jpennington@kykernel.com.