I fall into that small subset of sports fans for whom the Big Ten Network is an unalloyed good deal — Big Ten alumni living in the Midwest but outside of their school’s local area, who have high definition televisions and DirecTV. Accordingly, I’m looking forward to this weekend’s launch of the Big Ten Network.

Although Fighting Illini basketball has received pretty good national coverage the last few years, the football team is, to put it charitably, not very good, with the result that most of their games were shown only locally, or not at all. So I’m looking forward to the new television deal, which brings the opportunity to watch the Illini play with far more frequency than used to be the case.

Everyone else should obviously blame the cable companies, who, although they’re making the correct business decision given the likely future trajectory for league-operated television networks, are still cable companies, and thus eligible for no sympathy whatsoever.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 2:07 pm, 31 August 2007 and filed under Madison News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.