MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — By now you’ve either ponied up your $5 to watch Saturday’s West Virginia-Kansas football game or are feeling pretty negative toward ESPN +.
If you’re on the negative side, Wednesday’s release of the WVU men’s basketball schedule certainly didn’t brighten your disposition.
The basketball team will have five games this season — including both games against Kansas — streamed live on ESPN’s brainchild designed for the conference.
ESPN + is a streaming service that requires a paid subscription of $4.99 a month that be canceled at any time.
Big picture: What the streaming service means to WVU and the other Big 12 schools is an additional $40 million in revenue spread out from now until the current TV rights deal ends with the conclusion of the 2024-25 basketball season.
Per the 10 Big 12 schools, we’re estimating an additional $1.5 million per year over the next six years on top of the annual media rights payout, which was $38.8 million in 2019.
This is not something that is going to get scrapped by making a few calls to the WVU athletic department, blaming WVU athletic director Shane Lyons or writing to your congressman.
Chances are, WVU will have more than one football game on the streaming service next season and possibly more than five on the men’s basketball side.
If there is any comfort to be taken in all of this, at least your not Kansas men’s basketball fans.
The Jayhawks will have 10 games on ESPN + this season, including their two preseason exhibitions and four non-conference games.
On to the rest of the WVU men’s schedule:
Aside from the ESPN streaming service, the Big 12 did the Mountaineers a real solid this season.
For starters, the back-to-back road games to start league play were shocked back to life.
Both the Jan. 4 game at Kansas and the Jan. 6 game at Oklahoma State will come while school is still in semester break, meaning the Mountaineers won’t have to rush back home in between to attend class.
WVU has another two-game road swing on Feb. 22 (at TCU) and Feb. 24 (at Texas), which basically allows the Mountaineers, who travel a round-trip distance of 20,722 miles for their nine Big 12 road games, to get four league road games in with just two trips.
As for the other five road games, only two are mid-week games and only one of those (Iowa State on March 3) is a late 9 p.m. start.
WVU only has two other 9 p.m. games scheduled, with one being the Oklahoma State game while school is out and the other is the Jan. 14 home game against TCU.
The only other quick Saturday-Monday turnaround will see WVU play at Kansas State at 2 p.m. on Jan. 18, giving the team ample time to get back to Morgantown to host Texas at 7 p.m. on Jan. 20.
The only drawback is WVU will not appear on Big Monday — as if you needed another reason to dislike ESPN.
The Mountaineers have had at least one Big Monday appearance in each of the last five years, but considering how well the Big 12 office took care of West Virginia’s chief travel concerns, no Big Monday games may be a small price to pay.
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