(11-28-2018, 07:13 PM)yvonne Wrote: If the country couldn't care less about a fair number of Pac-12 schools — something that could change had they the opportunity to watch teams — why is it necessary to play the majority of games at times inconvenient for fans? Only a few games, based on this reasoning, need to be played at 10:00 or later.
Because those games still draw more far more eyeballs on a Saturday night than the 12th edition of Sportscenter, so ESPN is happy to toss a bunch of cash at the Pac-12 to take that slot. I'm fairly confident when the next rounds of negotiations happen in the early/mid 2020s, that will no longer be the case, at which point they may revert to games that are better for fans than for networks. But by then we'll probably all be dead from [your choice of: global warming; global pandemic; AI overlords; nuclear winter], so debatable whether that's worth looking forward to...