Seriously??? wrote:
I guess I knew that Ohio was a backwater place, but are you really telling me that there are an appreciable number of people in Ohio who a) do not have internet (you can watch the game online), b) do not have cable, and c) live so damn far from civilization that it is a 20 mile drive to the nearest establishment with a cable television? Is it still 1937 in Ohio?
a) Most games on ESPN are BLOCKED if you don't have Time Warner. ESPN probably couldn't bribe Dish or Direct TV enough to let their viewers watch online.
b) Some do not have cable because they can't afford it. Others have just made the decision tv in general is not something they want to spend a lot of time watching.
c) The largest town in our county has 3,000 people. Any establishment would close at 9 or 10 pm anyway.
As far as still being 1937, those times for sportswatching are closer than you think. I remember working at my dad's gas station when I was 9 or 10 and listening to the Buckeyes every saturday afternoon on the radio. Last spring I watched the Lady Buckeyes play a lot of games when they were on tv. They made the tourney so I wanted to watch that game. To really screw us customers over who had switched to Dish from Time Warner, espn2 yanked the local buckeyes game off and had another region (east, no surprise) on. Then, when I went to the internet, (espn.com) the only way I could watch is if I was a subscriber of Time Warner. (That is the only cable provider in my town.) I ended up just like 1973 listening to the game on the radio. Later, my parents who live a few blocks from me and still have time warner told me they saw the game on espn2. That told me it was espn (and their unyielding greed) that blocked Dish from showing that game to their local market.
Sometimes it is not about being a backwater hillbilly, it is about the greed of the large companies using those sports events that people used to watch on broadcast tv as a bargaining chip to get the cable and satellite companies to pay them more money. Just in the last couple years, virtually every Buckeyes boys basketball games have been moved to cable. Only 2 games are scheduled on broadcast tv (cbs) this year. The big ten network took all of those games and used them to get Dish, time warner, etc to pay them huge sums of money with the end result being large increases for the consumer.
On a side note, we have a very large Amish population in our county so they may even be earlier than 1937 by modern standards.