BY DAVID COLLIER
dlcollie@go.olemiss.edu
As if Ole Miss fans weren’t already feeling a knife in their stomach from another baseball season that ended without meeting expectations, Texas and ESPN cut a little deeper Tuesday when they announced Ole Miss’ Sept. 14 road trip to Texas would be televised on the Longhorn Network.
The announcement sent fury throughout the Rebel fan base and rightfully so. A matchup that was supposed to give Ole Miss national exposure is immediately made into one that Rebel fans will be lucky to see.
First, Texas limits the ticket allotment to Ole Miss to a measly 4,000 tickets, and now, the game that was likely to be on ESPN’s flagship network like last year’s contest between the two programs in Oxford, can only be seen by roughly 10 million LHN subscribers. The only major cable or satellite provider that carries LHN is AT&T U-verse.
Not only is that not fair to Ole Miss and Texas fans who aren’t lucky enough to have tickets to the game, but it virtually blacks out all of the Southeastern Conference country that would have a lot of interest in watching the game.
Instead of having a marquee matchup between the SEC and Big 12 to watch following Alabama’s contest at Texas A&M, which is set for a 2:30 p.m. kickoff on CBS, college football fans will have to look to watch conference matchups such as Vanderbilt at South Carolina or Mississippi State at Auburn or nonconference matchups such as UCLA at Nebraska or Louisville at Kentucky.
After Tuesday’s announcement, the Ole Miss football account sent out a tweet that said, “Ole Miss and ESPN are working on TV accommodations for Rebel fans for the Texas game.”
That likely will result in the game being available in Mississippi in some way, possibly as a pay-per-view option. However, what about the fans who live outside of the state?
It’s easy to see LHN and ESPN messed this one up, and it is sure to have a long-term impact on the way Texas schedules nonconference opponents in the future. Would you want to play a home and home with the Longhorns without a clause in the contract prohibiting LHN from broadcasting the game? Absolutely not.
For now, it appears all Ole Miss can do is try to work out something to make the game available to some of the fan base, but that won’t change what really matters.
Rebel head coach Hugh Freeze and his staff still have the same job to do, and if they go in to Austin and get a win over the Longhorns, you can rest assured that Ole Miss fans won’t care whatthey had to do to see it.
For continuing coverage of Ole Miss football, follow @DavidLCollier and @thedm_sports on Twitter.
