Next SEC TV contract needs to show more respect to Hogs fans

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — A lot gets asked of Razorbacks fans.

• Spend almost a month's pay getting the family up to Fayetteville for a weekend to watch the Hogs drop another heartbreaker.
• Make sure Santa fills most of the presents and basically all of the stockings with Arkansas gear.
• Plan a big family vacation, but then scale that down to donate to the Razorbacks' NIL.
• Schedule the much smaller vacation through the new Hogs' NIL portal to make sure a little more money goes back to purchasing players.

And for all of that financial effort tilted the university's way, these same fans get to pay a lot of money to make sure they have the ESPN networks only to either miss the first several minutes of the game because no one knows how schedules work, or they must pay extra for special privileges with the ESPN app because the television provider is in a spat with Disney.

There's not a lot that can be done right now about college athletics programs leeching their fans dry to the point they are going back to writing checks to pay bills because it won't be good when the check arrives to keep the lights on, but by the time they cash it, it should be able to go through.

However, being able to take in the game Razorbacks fans sacrifice so much to make happen in its fullest extent is something that can be addressed. It was a mistake to give a single entity the rights to all of the SEC's programming rather than having a featured game on CBS at 2:30 p.m. each Saturday afternoon.

That single game seemed to do just enough to avoid scheduling conflicts from games running over most of the time, although not all. However, with two more teams added and the CBS game gone, ESPN has overcrowded its programming and never bothered to find a solution.

That solution will be possible in 2033 though. That's when the contract with ESPN expires.

At that time, the rights need to go to YouTube. The platform was highly successful with its NFL season opening game between the Los Angeles Chargers and Kansas City Chiefs.

Guess what doesn't happen if games get broadcast on YouTube. No one misses the first eight minutes trying to figure out what network their team got kicked to because the game before ran a normal, reasonable amount of time.

The game simply starts and people watch. At no point in time should anything be missed even if fans click on the game late.

They just slide the play indicator back to the beginning and start watching. Now, some might assume based on the drama taking place online in regard to NFL games being a bit scattered this past weekend, that there might be a little uneasiness about the SEC going to YouTube.

However, those complaints were about games being on Amazon Prime, which is an App that isn't as widely used as YouTube. These posts, presumably by elderly men who claimed to be veterans who felt betrayed by the NFL, complained the games that should have been on broadcast TV were behind a paywall on streaming.

To be honest, for much of America, Prime Video isn't thought of as being behind a pay wall because it comes free with an Amazon Prime subscription, which most people have so deliveries from Amazon are free. It's not mentally associated with the lightly used video app.

However, these people are right. For them, it's a pain to find and load an app, that is if they even understand how that process works, and it's especially insulting to have to drag out the wallet to pay the membership to see what they suspect will be a single playoff game for their team on the platform.

However, YouTube is much different. Almost all televisions in American homes are smart TVs now and the one app that definitely comes preloaded that is super easy to use is YouTube.

The one thing my young teenage son and my father have in common is they both kill a ton of time watching YouTube. Same for my father-in-law.

It's the broadcast television of its time. It's free so long as someone is wiling to spend a few seconds waiting on ads to pass, and it's available all over the place.

Whether it's the television, cell phone, computer, or, oddly in the case of many over age 60, on an iPad, access to YouTube is easy and heavily used. There is no generational gap involved, which avoids what the NFL is dealing with now in regard to the playoff backlash.

While there appears to be no analytics available for official SEC content on YouTube, we do know that viewers logged over 350 million hours watching official NFL content.

Obviously, this has to do with rights to broadcast games, but it would be nice if YouTube were able to keep a lot of the programming currently provided by the SEC Network. If some form of SEC Nation, SEC This Morning and SEC Now could be kept, that would be great.

It would be nice to incorporate some form of documentary content also, but there is a lot of fluff the SEC runs out there to fill programming time that would be a great place to cut costs. After all, YouTube wouldn't have to fill 24 hours per day with programming, so what is produced could be done at a high level.

While that would be a mild perk, the biggest improvement is simply knowing fans can tune in at the time a game is supposed to start and know they are going to get to watch that game. There is no frantic scramble of trying to search social media to see if anyone knows where the game got kicked to a few minutes ago.

There will be no surprises for the savvy fans who try to make the most of life by spending extra family time while the DVR builds up so they can blow through all of the first half commercials only to find most of the first quarter missing with no way of watching how the game arrived at its 10-7 score.

Everyone, young and old, gets to simply click and watch the product that costs them so much to support each season. For once, they will be treated with the smallest level of respect.

That is, unless ESPN finds a way to wrangle away yet another decade of SEC football to keep its struggling company afloat. Then, it's back to the mad scramble each Saturday once again.

Hogs Feed: