Bumped by the Booth: ESPN Leaves Gators Fans Chasing Their Own Ballgame

Somewhere in Bristol, a man in a fleece vest looked at a clock, saw the No. 1 team in America playing out the last minutes of its season opener, and decided the nation needed Peyton and Eli more.

That's the only explanation I can come up with for what ESPN did Monday night. Florida and Miami, a top-15 in-state game that opened the college basketball season, got thrown off ESPN2 in the final minutes and dumped onto ESPNEWS.

That's the channel you only find by accident while hunting for the Weather Channel.

Why? So the ManningCast could start on time. Not Monday Night Football. The real broadcast was on ESPN and nobody touched it.

The basketball game got bumped for the alternate feed. The side dish. Two brothers in sweatshirts warming up with small talk about their kids' soccer schedules. College basketball's opening night got evicted so the pregame banter on a second-screen show wouldn't be five minutes late.

Blasphemy. There's no other word.

Where Did My Game Go?

You know how it went. You're settled in, the Gators are closing out the Hurricanes, and suddenly the screen is showing a Monday Night Football promo or a ManningCast countdown. Then a little crawl says the game "continues on ESPNEWS." So off you go with the remote like a man looking for his car keys in the dark.

Up the guide, down the guide. Is ESPNEWS in my package? Is it on the streaming app? Do I have to log in? What's my password? By the time you find it, the game you were watching is basically over and you missed what you tuned in for.

This keeps happening, and it gets worse every year. And the viewer, who pays for all of this, is the one nobody thinks about.

The 64 Seconds That Wouldn't End

I'll be fair, since a good critic is fair before he's done being mean: the game didn't help itself. The last 64 seconds were awful. The officials and the replay people took over the building like a hostage crew. Stop the world, we have to get this right. Right for whom?

Florida was up nine. Miami wasn't coming back. Nobody's fate was hanging on whether the ball came off a fingernail with 0.8 left on the shot clock.

But they went to the monitor anyway. Again. And again. They treated it like a February game with the SEC title on the line instead of a November opener in Tampa that was already decided. A finish that should've been over long before ESPN pulled the plug kept dragging, one review and one huddle at a time.

So yes, the stripes and the replay booth share the blame. Get off my TV screen, fellas! Nobody bought a ticket to watch you squint at a monitor!

But that doesn't let ESPN off the hook. College basketball games run past their two-hour window all the time. Everybody in TV knows it. Every producer knows it. It's predictable, and ESPN owns the sport's TV rights and should plan for it. Nobody else is going to.

ESPN could have let the game finish, with five or ten minutes of patience. It chose the ManningCast.

Folks Noticed

Plenty of people saw it. Sportswriters, college hoops accounts and Gators fans lit up social media. The general message was that you don't treat the No. 1 team's opener like filler. The Gators won 77-67, and much of the audience missed the closing minutes live because the network sent the game somewhere else.

That's not a scheduling glitch. That's carelessness, and some contempt too. The big networks charge whatever fees they want, bundle the channels any way they like, and then make you look for the product you already paid for. Inconvenience the customer, apologize to nobody, and do it again next week.

Bring Back the Bricks!

Some of you old-timers will remember the rubber bricks. Back in the Howard Cosell days on Monday Night Football, somebody sold soft bricks so frustrated fans could throw them at the TV without wrecking the set. A safe way to blow off steam for people driven nuts by the broadcast.

Monday night I'd have thrown one. I'd have thrown two. I'd love to stand up and do the Howard Beale bit. "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" But you remember what happened to Beale, don't you?

In "Network," the 1976 satire, Peter Finch plays an aging, unraveling anchorman who explodes on live TV. The country goes along with him and opens the windows to scream. But nothing changes. The network executives take his rage, package it, put sponsors on it and turn it into a hit show. He becomes the product he was screaming about.

When his ratings drop, the suits have him taken out, killed on the air. That's the joke. The network always wins. Your outrage is content. Your complaint is engagement. This column probably counts as a page view somewhere in Bristol.

So I'm not going to tell you this will change. It won't. ESPN will keep bumping games, the replay booth will keep stopping the clock, and you'll keep scrolling the guide asking where your game went. There's not much we can do about it. Except maybe find a rubber brick.

More from GatorBait: our Florida basketball coverage, roster and Franz Beard on the game itself: Miami was no match for No. 1 Florida's intensity.

Cover photo: Florida's Alex Condon drives against Stetson in an exhibition at the O'Connell Center. Photo by Chris Spears, GatorBaitMedia.com