Boilermusings August 5, 2021

Streaming sports, Football open practice, and the NCAA and women’s sports

Welcome to Boilermusings where I cram three or more stories together into one because sometimes you can’t write a whole article about one thing but you think it’s important so you want to let the people know. It’s sort of the appetizer sampler platter of articles.

Streaming Sports

It was announced this week that Notre Dame’s first football game of the season against Toledo will be streaming exclusively on Peacock. That’s it. It won’t be on NBC or any over the air channel, no cable channel will show it, just Peacock. This is a big change. Of course there have been games that are on ESPN+ or previously ESPN3 or BTN+ for years but those are generally pre-season games or even early season basketball games with little consequence.

Not this though. This is the first regular season game of the season and it’s streaming exclusively on a streaming service that’s younger than my 14 month old son. I’m not sure what the financial situation is like with this but it sure would have to be a pretty sweet deal for Notre Dame to agree to this. I know that Peacock is owned by NBC which is owned by Comcast/Xfinity so it’s all one company but it’s definitely a strange situation.

In my mind these leads to questions about if other streaming services will get involved in the live sports games. Amazon Prime is already involved in Thursday Night Football with the NFL and I don’t think it’s going to be the end. Streaming was once seen as giving fans the ability to break away from the cable companies and the 300 channels when you watch 12 but we are quickly heading in a direction where if you want to watch your team you may have to have 12 streaming service. It’s something to watch going forward.

Purdue Football Open Practice

With fans able to return to Ross-Ade Stadium in 2021 it looks like Bobinski and the athletic department are pulling out all the stops to try to drum up some excitement for the team. Tomorrow evening Purdue will host an open practice and a movie night.

The movie, Remember the Titans, will be played on that new video board that Purdue didn’t get a chance to show off last season. This will be a great opportunity for fans to get their first live look at the Boilermakers. I hope that fans take advantage of this cool opportunity. More info is available at the Purdue sports website.

NCAA and Gender Equality

I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that when the report from the NCAA about the gender issues came out there was a finding that the NCAA has not focused equally on men’s and women’s sports.

The report found that the NCAA focused on the men’s basketball tournament over everything else. If you followed the weight room and swag controversy from this year’s NCAA tournament this shouldn’t be any sort of surprise. This is something that we’ve all known and lived with for as long as we’ve watched sports. As I always like to point out in these articles, the NCAA is not subject to Title IX. There are of course issues of money, men’s basketball and football make by far the most money, but the NCAA simply cannot continue to embarrass itself in this way going forward. The situation needs to be fixed and I hope this report is the first step in that direction.