Get ready to shell out for your football fix

PASADENA, Calif. — A story I wrote that ran in Wednesday's paper pointed out that the announcement that CSTV and The mtn. will be on Comcast systems in Utah before the football season begins began by saying that this was good news to "a lot" of Ute and Cougar fans. It didn't say it was good news to ALL the fans, because it's not.

In case you missed it, the age of free, over-the-air sports is quickly coming to an end. It's certainly over for the Mountain West Conference, which will air games exclusively on cable and satellite systems.

And it's going to cost us to see CSTV and the Mountain West-only channel, The mtn. Certainly, it's going to cost fans who don't subscribe to cable or satellite already, because Utah has only one game scheduled on broadcast TV (Ch. 14 will carry the Utah-USU game) and BYU has none. Eleven of Utah's games will be on cable; all 12 of BYU's will be.

There is nothing particularly new and surprising about this. Sports in general and college football in particular have been migrating to cable for years.

And it's going to cost a lot of current cable/satellite subscribers more than they're already paying to see the Cougars and the Utes, too. It's unlikely that any cable or satellite company is going to put both CSTV and The mtn. on its most basic, lowest-cost package.

Comcast, for example, has announced that it will put CSTV on its digital lineup. Which means that you'll have to have digital cable in order to see three BYU games and three (possibly four) Utah games.

And you'll at least need to subscribe to basic cable if you want to see the six (possibly seven) Utah games and the seven BYU games scheduled on The mtn.

That's just Comcast, and just in Utah. Other Comcast systems in other states are handling it differently (if they carry the channels at all). And different cable/satellite providers will handle this differently (if they carry the channels at all) in various parts of Utah and throughout the country.

Unfortunately, none of us has the right to see our local teams on TV for free. It's not like it was guaranteed in the Constitution or anything. It would be nice if the Utes and Cougars were on free, over-the-air TV every week, but that's never going to happen again.

And paying for sports on TV is nothing new, either. You've been paying to see everything you watch on ESPN for years, it's just that most of you weren't altogether aware of that fact. Something in the neighborhood of a dollar a month of what you pay your cable company goes straight to ESPN.