“Honest, we’re not to blame. You believe me, right? Guys?”

Editor’s Update, 11/26/08, 8:03 am: After thinking about it, I realized that the post I made last night is poorly written and never really makes a clear point.  I’m disappointed and frustrated with Gonzaga, but by the end of my stuff here, I just come across as whining.  In the end, I believe that Gonzaga thinks it’s special and unique from other universities.  For many people it is and then some, but for me, it’s getting to the point that I have a hard time believing it to be the case.  That’s really what I was trying to get at…sorry it takes me 65,000 words to finally sort of get there. 

I’ll count the last week or so as among the saddest in GU basketball history.  Oh, there have been darker moments (UCLA, @ UVa) and stupider moments (mushroom arrest), but I don’t know if I can think something that has made me more sad than piecing together the details behind the Idaho game blackout.

I originally thought it was some kind of silly scheduling mix-up, but I got an email directing me to the Message Board (always a bad start), where details and emails from various groups started rolling in.  Zag fans across the country were rightly pissed off that they missed the game, and in the grand tradition of people who are pissed, message boarders sent angry emails.  But as is part of the process, the people who received the angry emails are all too eager to pass the blame onto someone else.  Best as I can piece it together, here’s how things evolved, and how we got from me being bummed at missing one game to me being really bummed at missing a lot more than one game:

• Emails sent to Fox Sports ask why the Idaho game was blacked out receive response that Fox cannot televise GU games outside of GU’s “home market” because the U sold the rights to ESPN.
• Email sent to Oliver Pierce, Gonzaga Sports Information Director, ask why Gonzaga would sell the rights to ESPN and receive response that the GU contract is with Fox Sports Northwest, and not the entire family of Fox Sports networks.  I think to myself (as I remember watching nearly every game for the past three seasons on Fox College Sports) that that response makes no sense.
• Pierce clarifies his original strange answer with a quick buck-passing.  Turns out the blacked-out Idaho game was not a schedule mix-up or a Fox Northwest anomaly, but rather a result of the WCC (read: not Gonzaga) selling its broadcast rights to ESPN.  Thus, Fox Sports can only show GU games to people living in a ten-state region including essentially the entire West Coast.  Pierce’s email essentially concludes with the hope that the reader will ”please understand this is an ESPN agreement with the WCC and not a Gonzaga agreement with ESPN.”

This last part really dumbfounded me.  Zag fans are looking for some answer, any answer to this dumbness, and the best Gonzaga could come up with was that it wasn’t its fault?  I don’t know if I can put my finger on it, but that struck me as strange.  So in the middle of this being struck strange, I realized two things.  First, the super sweet TV package that let me watch nearly every single game for the past three years was pretty much goners.  Second, and this is that bright side I’m working on, when looking at the schedule, every “big” game is on ESPN or another non-FSN network, so I’ll only be missing the Portlands and USFs of the world.  So it’s not all bad, and really, it’s probably a lot less bad than I even realize now.  But I kept going back to that whole “It was the WCC and not Gonzaga” thing, so much so that I sent what I thought was a pretty rational and reasonable email of my own to Oliver Pierce.

I couldn’t imagine how Gonzaga, the, let’s be honest, reason why ESPN works with the WCC in the first place, could not have stepped in to keep its games on FSN nation-wide if it really wanted to.  So I asked Pierce essentially how much effort went, on Gonzaga’s part, into fighting the deal while it was in the works, and how much is going in to fight it now that it’s apparantly official.  Company lines being what they are, I wasn’t too surprised to hear Pierce remind me again that it was the WCC making a decision that was in their best business interests, and Gonzaga was powerless to stop it.  When I emailed him back and said I respected his time and the position he was in but reminded him that he never answered my question, he told me, very curtly, that there was nothing that Gonzaga could do.  So, I guess that means it was the WCC’s fault.  Point made.

I’m not a business guy and I never will be.  I’m sure there’s a very valuable and logical explanation for all of this, something dealing with marginal returns or dividends or whatever.  What I do know is that the WCC is doing something that it says is a good business move, and in the meantime, GU’s own fans are getting left in the dark.  Sure there might only be a small number of us who live outside the 10-state region or can’t get a satellite dish like so many geniuses on the Message Board keep urging, but even that small number are Zag fans.  Some of us even have degrees from Gonzaga University and were once called “the people the world needs most.”  Today, though, we’re getting fed a company line that does nothing but blame someone else.  So, yeah, I’m not a business guy, but ask yourself, if some other conference, say the Pac 10 (which I think GU would have a more than legitimate chance of winning this season if it were a member), sold TV rights to games that kept a chunk of say, Oregon fans from watching a chunk of Oregon games, would Oregon say there was nothing to be done?  Maybe, but if you were a Zag fan watching that situation, would you say that the Oregon fans who were getting blacked out had legitimate beef with their school as they asked for something more than “It wasn’t our fault”?

Gonzaga is many things to many people, and many of those people probably think I’m in outer space right now trying to find any faults with the University.  That’s fine, and it’s all relative and a product of perception.  Some may not see this as no big deal, ”only basketball games” or something.  It is basketball games, true, but to me it’s more than that.  It’s another sign that trying desperately to move up to the world of big university status is a business, and the rest of us are just watching.  Or not watching, as it were.  Unless, of course, you have Direct TV or live in a 10-state region that includes most of the West Coast. 

Go Zags.

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