(04-16-2018 02:07 PM)AppManDG Wrote:  

(04-13-2018 01:53 PM)UConnHusky Wrote:  

(04-13-2018 01:28 PM)ken d Wrote:  

(04-13-2018 01:08 PM)billybobby777 Wrote:  

(04-12-2018 02:00 PM)ken d Wrote:  He's probably too young to remember that before the Big East gifted UConn with a golden ticket to that league nobody knew that UConn played basketball (or anything else) either. And he's probably afraid that now that they are out of the Big East, it won't be long before the next generation of fans won't know that they do now.

I grew up watching Georgetown vs St Johns Big East games before there was a ton of college basketball on tv...it was very rare in the early 80's unlike today with cable tv. Younger fans simply don't understand how college sports was before ESPN took over.
I first heard of UCONN in the 90's when Iowa beat them in a Hawaii tournament and afterwards people were telling us that Iowa pulled a huge upset!! We were all saying, "Who's UCONN?" Not derisive. We honestly didn't know who they were.

If you think hoops in the early 80's was rare on TV, imagine what it was like in the 50's and 60's when I first started following the sport. Before the classic UCLA-Houston game in the Astrodome (I think around 1968) what there was was very local in scope. Love 'em or hate 'em, ESPN changed sports in a cosmic way.

I grew up without any college allegiances, since there really wasn't much in the way of big time sports in or near New Jersey. If you wanted to find the score of a UConn game in the papers (which was about the only way to find it) you had to look really hard. If the NY Times had it, it was given about the same coverage as the Slippery Rock game. No joke - for some unknown reason Slippery Rock had almost a cult like following in the area.

We lived in a different world then.

Fun fact: ESPN was actually originally created to cover the New England Whalers, Bristol Red Sox, and UConn Huskies. It was meant to be a Connecticut cable sports channel and it sort of exploded into something that nobody ever could have imagined at that time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ESPN#Origins

So why was one of it's first telecasts a soccer match between App State and Western Carolina from Boone in September of 1979?

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Because it was cheaper to broadcast via 24 hr satellite vs being a cable-only channel and ESPN needed national, not regional programming.