Plenty of Entities to be Frustrated at Over ESPN+ Game, OSU Is Not One of Them

If you haven’t already realized it, you will at about 5:50 p.m. on Saturday evening. Oklahoma State’s second Big 12 Conference game of the season against undefeated Kansas State is not on television. At least not on traditional television.

We’ve gotten so used to every OSU football game (and nearly every basketball game) being televised that it’s jarring when you realize that of the 600 channels you get at your home, OSU will be on none of them come Saturday night.

That’s because OSU-KSU will be on ESPN+. What is ESPN+? It’s ESPN’s answer to Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu. It’s digital-only, costs $4.99 a month, and ESPN is currently trying to stock it with programming to make purchasing it worth your while. An easy way to do that is to put a good conference game on there at the end of September.

OSU was on ESPN+ at the beginning of September in its first home game against McNeese. As one friend told me the day after that game, “I didn’t watch, but if they put a real game on there, I might have to get it.” This is what ESPN is betting on, even if that wasn’t all that clear when all of this was first announced.

The Big 12 (finally) sold off its third-tier rights (non-revenue sports and a few hoops and football games annually but no OU or Texas) earlier this year when it packaged them with three Big 12 title games, and ESPN purchased the whole thing. I wrote a lot about that here, but here’s a blip from an ESPN article about it back in April.

In addition, eight of the 10 schools in the league will ship hundreds of games across multiple sports to ESPN+ beginning this year, including one regular-season football game, as well as men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, softball, soccer and volleyball games. [ESPN]

One regular-season football game … So you can see why a KSU-OSU game on ESPN+ came as a bit of a surprise to Oklahoma State given that they’d already put their one game (McNeese) on there three weeks ago.

“It is different than what we messaged all summer,” OSU senior associate athletic director Kevin Klintworth told The Oklahoman last week. “We realize that and we realize that’s probably an inconvenience for people. We’re hoping that it’s a short-term speed bump that leads to a bigger product for the Big 12.”

The entire thing was seemingly out of OSU’s hands. The way I understand it is that this game is not part of the third-tier rights ESPN purchased, but rather it’s part of the original inventory ESPN purchased years ago to put on ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC.

Here’s how it probably went down: Because of some language on page 394 (ish) of ESPN’s contract with the Big 12 (which was signed years ago), ESPN reserved the right to move some of its future inventory to a future digital-only entity that folks had to pay extra for even though that digital-only entity literally did not exist at the time the ESPN-Big 12 contract was signed.

Here’s how it was stated at the time the Big 12 signed that huge contract.

Without being specific, [Big 12 commissioner Bob] Bowlsby said there are provisions in the new deal and an ongoing dialogue for “active issues, changing circumstances” and potential changes should there ever be league expansion and changes such as the re-establishment of a Big 12 conference championship game in football if more teams are added. [ESPN]

Reading between the lines is not difficult here as we connect the dots from that statement back in 2012 to this one from last week.

The game was part of a preseason pool of ESPN-owned games. ESPN and the Big 12 later collaborated to place the game on the service. ESPN informed the university last week it remained a possibility. Monday, it became reality. There is no guarantee, but the belief around OSU is this will be the final football game on ESPN+ this season. [NewsOK]

ESPN is a good partner for the Big 12. They pay the Big 12 a lot of money. There’s no reason for the Big 12 to push back against this. Again, read between the lines here in this piece from Guerin Emig in the Tulsa World.

 I asked the Big 12 for clarity, and associate commissioner Bob Burda replied via email: “In talking with our ESPN partners, it was agreed there was an opportunity to continue growing the new Big 12 on ESPN+ platform in this first year.”

Burda confirmed the conference was approached by ESPN to add inventory to ESPN+. OSU-KSU was eligible to be moved. ESPN saw the game as an attractive way to promote its digital platform, and the Big 12 signed off. [Tulsa World]

Business decisions. This isn’t all that different than if we randomly decided to put my 10 Thoughts or Kyle’s recruiting pieces behind a paywall. Blowback? Sure, but maybe a good business decision for us.

ESPN isn’t — to my knowledge anyway — doing anything illegal or that it isn’t allowed to do based on its contract with the Big 12. It may be doing something it wasn’t expected to do — which is why your ire shouldn’t be toward OSU — but as they ramp up for a digital future, it makes sense that ESPN would collect subs to ESPN+.

My big takeaway? As we go further and further down this road, we start to realize that the unintended consequence (and massive irony) of the great unbundling of cable television is that because of the way content is owned and distributed, the group that seems like it should benefit most from an unbundling — us, the consumer (we’ll be able to pick everything a la carte!) — is often the group that is most negatively affected.