Game Fourteen: With Gonzaga University, “televised games” continues to be relative

Like a lot of you, I didn’t watch the game last night.  Not that I didn’t want to, because I totally did.  A chance to watch the now on-fire Zags destroy take on a community college team conference foe was super enticing, but I had a work event and forgot to set my DVR.  Not like it would have mattered had I remembered, though, because the game was apparently blacked out on Root Sports in Seattle (or at least it was moved from regular Root channels to some kind of backwoods Root alternative channel hidden somewhere between Lifetime 2 and The Military Channel).  Seems like, though, that the Zags looked good.  Or at least they eventually looked good.  Or maybe Pepperdine just sucks a lot.  I’ve got no clue (though I was dismayed to see that my boy Guy Landry Edi scored one more point and grabbed one more rebound last night than I did), but a 456-point blowout (give or take) over a conference team in a game that a bunch of Zag fans didn’t see brings up two omnipresent La Rev issues:

1) That the WCC sucks monkey balls.  Zag fans love to point to any and all pieces of data that might allow them to suggest the WCC is getting better.  Lookit Saint Mary’s and all their Australians!  Lookit Brandon Davies and how awesome BYU is!  Cool, but let’s not forget to also lookit the fact that the Zags have beaten two straight conference teams by an average of nearly 34 points. and that the last time a Gonzaga team consistently blew conference teams out was in 2008-2009 (the team that lost to Carolina in the Sweet Sixteen).  Given the small sample size, I’m not sure what those two blowouts mean, but it brings up two questions: 1) Is the conference not only not getting better but actually getting worse? and 2) Does it matter?

2) That Gonzaga used to have a sweet, basically national TV deal all to itself and now it’s getting blacked out in its own state.  Long-time La Rev readers are surely sick of hearing about this by now, but in case you’re new to the building, consider the following timeline:

2005-2006: Gonzaga reaches its own deal with Fox Sports Northwest and the network starts showing Zag games to any TV on which it airs.  By default, this includes TVs in Washington, Oregon, and northern Idaho.  Not bad, but to make things even greater, any cable subscriber willing to pay a small fee (under $5 monthly) can add Fox Sports Northwest to their cable package, thus allowing them to watch every Gonzaga game no matter where in the United States they live.  For example, I lived in Washington, DC, and didn’t miss a game for three straight seasons thanks to the package.  The whole thing (and the publicity it brought) was an amazing coup for a small mid-major university that was basically unheard  of five years earlier.

2008-2009: The West Coast Conference, in all of its rinky-dink, Mickey Mouse glory, sold an exclusive TV deal to ESPN.  Under the deal, ESPN now owned exclusive broadcast rights to every nationally-televised WCC game.  This forced cable providers to black out every game ESPN didn’t broadcast itself, and sadly, that included the Fox Sports Northwest games that had been beemed across the country for three seasons.  Even more sadly, Gonzaga stood by and did nothing, and even more sadly than that, representatives of the university (in this case Sports Information Director Oliver Pierce) responded to numerous questions/concerns by blaming the West Coast Conference and saying Gonzaga had nothing to do with it. (The whole sad affair is summed up here.  Please read through to learn more because I’m getting angry even writing this.)

2008-present: Unless you live in a 10-state region or have a satellite dish, you are unable to watch Zag games on Root Sports Northwest (formerly Fox Sports Northwest), even if you were able to in 2005.  To repeat, in 2005, Zag fans in 50 states could watch any Zag game they wanted, and in 2011, only those in ten states could.  For all you non-math majors, that’s an 80% drop.

Yesterday: In a somewhat different twist, a Zag game broadcast on Root Sports Northwest was blacked out by Root Sports Northwest in a major American city filled with Zag fans and not only located within the ten-state region mentioned above, but within the very same state as Gonzaga itself.  I’d ask my old friend Oliver Pierce what the Athletic Department did to stop, or at least protest, that fact, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like the answer.

But, hey, the Zags won big.  So there’s that.

Go Zags.