Smarter, more agile brains than ours are busy picking apart the technical details and forecasting the potential success of the Big Ten network. In summary, though, here’s what you need to know:

1. The Big Ten is building its own television network. You know, much like the one Notre Dame has called NBC.


AIIIIIGGGGHHH!!! We hope the Big Ten gets someone more lifelike than synthflesh-covered cyborg Tom Hammond to call their games.

2. The Big Ten Network would broadcast games “carved out” of existing network agreements. So rather than the pork tenderloin of Michigan/Ohio State, you’d likely be looking at the head cheese and chitterlings of Purdue/Northwestern if you tuned in during the fall.

3. The Big Ten Network, headed by Bud Selig Charm School Graduate Jim Delany, is charging viewers more than any network besides ESPN for its services.

4. This has gotten the fledgling network into a tiff with cable giant Comcast, and their tussle has been prodigious enough to attract the attention of the three most important media outlets in the nation: MGoBlog, The New York Times, and Sunday Morning Quarterback, all of whom have spent considerable bandwidth and column space discussing it in intelligent fashion.

We here at EDSBS are of the opinion that Jim Delany is a complete and total dickface, even above and beyond the dickfacedness required in being a conference head. (See “SEC is fast because they cut class” incident, 2007.) However, the pricing argument presents a canard for those who would want to demonize the easy, miles-wide target the Big Ten commish offers.

The price remains astronomically high for a network, but we’re not talking Fuse here–we’re talking about a sports network, and a boutique-y one at that with a following that tends to pay whatever it has to for access to even the most rancid of content. Sports networks, as the NYT points out with a nifty sidebar, are among the most expensive per viewer. It makes sense that a startup network with a small but rabid following just going into year one would charge upwards of two dollars for the service, since there’s a lot of startup, a smallish pool of viewers, and boundless potential for demand. The price, over time, will flatten as subscribers line up.

This bit of logic won’t stop people (especially bloggers) from holding their noses and picking a side in the meteor game that is a corporate pissfight between Comcast and the Big Ten Network. Good luck with that–either one would sell your grandmother for kibble, take the dog that had eaten your grandmother, and then cook it and serve it to you as cut-rate bratwurst. It’s a pissing contest between two parties both extremely-well prepared for the fight.

And yet you merely delay the inevitable! As much of a reputation as the South has for breeding outspoken, Foghorn Leghorn orators, the SEC has actually handled most of its business
like mumming church elders lately, especially in comparison to Delany’s occasionally acrid public statements and sharp PR elbowing.

No matter, though–the Big Ten network will likely still grow into a cash pinata, with other regionals following, including (inevitably) the SEC, Pac-10, and Big 12. If you doubt it, ask the commissioner of the Big 12, who left his job last week to take a new job working at…the Big Ten Network. (God bless dramatic ellipses.)