How many times will the 
show the commercial featuring the girl retiring from soccer at age 9?
We’re nowhere near finding out, unfortunately.
Free ads, like that one, house ads, for ACC Network and ESPN programming, and still way-too-long commercial breaks, were the order of the day for the first full Saturday of college football on ACCN.
If you tuned in all day, from NC State-ECU all the way through UVA-Pitt, God love ya.
It’s understandable. The poor folks in sales don’t have much to sell, in the sense that, Comcast hasn’t signed on, Cox hasn’t signed on, basically, who’s watching?
Companies aren’t going to buy ads thinking nobody is watching, which is why we get the freebies for non-profits and house ads, ad nauseam.
That said, the ACC and ESPN worked for three years, and altered schedules, to get to this day.
The idea behind having Clemson-Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech-Boston College and UVA-Pitt open on the first weekend was to get the cable companies on board.
And … they’re not on board.
Unless you wanted to risk a free trial with YouTube TV or Hulu, you were SOL this weekend.
(The risk being: that you forget to cancel the free trial, and end up with a surprise $50 bill next month, just to watch one game.)
The sales folks weren’t the only ones off their games this weekend. There were so many basic presentation errors during the game broadcasts that it’s impossible to detail them all.
We could start with: since when do we show field-goal tries from the side, as we saw in the fourth quarter of the UVA-Pitt game, on the miss by Brian Delaney, with the game still in doubt?
Was it because the camera that should have had the shot from behind the play was out of position? Or because the director just didn’t make the call, somehow, some way?
Some combination of the above?
For the money that we’ve heard was invested into equipping the operation, it seemed like a cable-access production from start to finish.
With no ads.
And only a handful of people watching.
Can’t be a good night for the folks in Greensboro, considering.
Column by Chris Graham
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