College basketball - the TV landscape

Over the air networks
This is mainly CBS with weekend coverage along with full NCAA tournament coverage. ABC has a few games the last couple of months, with regional action overflowing to ESPN's FullCourt. NBC and Fox have shown no interest in college basketball. That's all on a national level. On a local/regional level, there is more stuff, featuring the local teams or conferences.

Basic/Expanded cable (analog channels)
This is mainly ESPN and ESPN2, along with FSN/FSN+ offering national/regional games. WGN offers the early season Wooden classic games, but that's about it. Other channels that typically show sports like TBS, TNT and USA do not carry any college basketball. (You may also remember Fox's FX experiment a few years ago).


Digital cable
This is where things get very interesting. ESPN's FullCourt is the grand-daddy of them all but you have to pay an annual fee to sign up for this pay-per-view package. But ESPN has expanded with ESPN-U, which has their own live games, along with games they pick up from ESPN+/Full court, along with reruns of exciting games from ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC. The emergence of ESPN-U has reduced the need for ESPN-Classic to carry games, although their "Turn Back the Clock" games were really cool.

Fox is bundling national and regional action into the three Fox College Sports channels. You can get lots of games here, as well as reruns of games you may have missed. The downside of FCS is that they are just showing games, there is no studio programming or anything else. They are basically showing things from all the regional FSNs.

CSTV was doing well on its own and I am guessing things can only get better after the CBS takeover. They have already created regional CSTV networks available by satellite. They should also make sure they take advantage of CBS Sports. They can show reruns of CBS games, and during March Madness they can show repeats of games later at night, or even show alternate games that are not shown on CBS.

Last but not least is Comcast Sports Net, which is building up momentum, and being owned by the cable company itself has certain advantages. They have a competitive slate of games, including their own productions, ESPN+ games, along with whatever else they can pick up.

You will also find a few games on the Black Family channel (formerly MBC) and BYU TV.

ESPN Classic used to show college basketball classic games. Now those are rare. But there are some classic games on CSTV, Fox College Sports and Black Family channel.