Friday's Rant: Kudos to Comcast

It's not often that we here at Panther Rants have anything nice to say about Comcast. It seems every year the cost of having cable and high-speed internet goes up 10-percent. And every year they seem to have a new excuse for the cost increases: technology, fuel prices, the cost of health care for employees, dog ate my homework, etc. Pretty soon, it'll be cheaper to lease a Buick than it will to have anything more than basic cable.

However, in the case of the cable provider telling the Fat 10 Network to piss off, we must raise a frosty mug in appreciation. The newly created network, with less than six weeks to go before college football season begins, still has yet to ink a deal with the cable television providing giant. Why? Well, for starters, the Fat 10, in it's finest example of it's well known arrogance, wants to charge the cable provider $1.10 per each subscriber that the channel reaches, a cost that will be passed along to consumers. A bargain for a Fat 10 alum that loves watching college swimming, gymnastics and wrestling (which is what most of the programming will be) but not so much for people who (a) didn't go to a Fat 10 school (b) don't care about Fat 10 sports (c) don't care about college sports at all (d) Don't like any sports, college or pro. An unscientific poll done by the Panther Rants staff has concluded that this is approximately 91-percent of the country.

And really, why would anyone wanna watch this channel? First off, they'll be broadcasting the games that no one else wants. ABC gets first dibs on marquee games, followed by ESPN and ESPN2. The Fat 10 network is then fourth in line. So basically, the network will have every game you've ever wanted to see Indiana play on Saturdays. And Sunday through Friday you'll have the joy of watching Fat 10 bowling, billiards, gymnastics, tiddlywinks, softball and the best damn pick-up sticks in the country.

Quite frankly, we at Panther Rants cant figure out why this unproven commodity feels the need to hold anyone hostage for it's unproven product. The more appropriate business model for the Fat 10 Network would be to tell cable providers, "take our channel for nothing and we'll make our money off of the advertising." But, as well all know, this is the Fat 10 Conference that we are talking about. A conference where the imperiousness of it's fans, alumni and administrators knows no boundaries. A conference that sneers at playing games on Thursday nights, yet Minnesota once played a home game against Michigan on a Friday.

So again, we here at Panther Rants applaud the folks at Comcast for not holding it's customers hostage for the whims on some overly-inflated egos in Chicago. And we encourage others to do the same. It's about time someone tell these stuffed shirts and bellys where they rightfully belong.

Lastly, we wonder what the NCAA's stance is or should be on one conference having it's own television network? We'd think that every Fat 10 team being on television somwhere would give the conference of slow white boys a distinct recruiting advantage over the other major conferences. Surely Myles Brand will release a statement on the issue just as soon as he's finished patting himself on the back for running Bob Knight out of town when he was the president at Indiana.