Ch. 2 punks Ch. 5, gets BYU-Stanford

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Sep 10, 2004 | by Scott D. Pierce Deseret Morning News

BYU and Stanford will be playing football on Saturday night, but NBC has already played hardball with KSL. Which is why the game won't be on Ch. 5 and will be on Ch. 2.

KSL had planned to carry the game, which will kick off shortly after 8 p.m. Mountain Time. The folks at Ch. 5 are always anxious to have the Cougars whenever they can. And that hasn't been all that often in recent years, what with so many games getting picked off by ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN-regional and ABC.

But under the terms of its contract with NBC, the station had to get permission from the network to pre-empt NBC programming. And NBC said no.

Ouch.

So instead of the Cougars and the Cardinal, KSL will be airing a repeat of Thursday's season premiere of "The Apprentice" and a rerun of an episode of "Crossing Jordan" from last season.

Ouch.

Which left SportsWest, which has the rights to the BYU telecast, looking for another option. KJZZ-Ch. 14 would seem a logical choice - - SportsWest has done business with them in the past -- but KJZZ is airing the Utah-at-Arizona game on Saturday at 8 p.m. So SportsWest shopped the game to KUTV. And Ch. 2, after getting permission from CBS, said yes.

What makes this really weird is that Ch. 2 is owned by CBS; Ch. 5 is just an affiliate of NBC. But networks are playing hardball with their affiliates these days.

CBS will air the women's finals of the U.S. Open tennis tournament on Saturday at 6 p.m. And the tennis match may or may not be over by 8 p.m., leaving Ch. 2 with an interesting dilemma.

But not as interesting as the dilemma faced by Ch. 5, which is going to have to compete against a BYU game it could have had. And KSL must go into that ratings battle armed with NBC repeats.

Ouch.

BIG PREDICTIONS: Utah fans were no doubt heartened by the predictions made by the guys on ESPN's "College Football Gameday" telecast this past Saturday. In the wake of the Utes' big win over Texas A&M (which also aired on ESPN), grid gurus Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit stated categorically that Utah will finish the season undefeated.

Wow. How cool would that be?

Of course, Corso and Herbstreit also stated categorically that Notre Dame would beat BYU.

INTERESTING TIMING: BYU officials insist that firing its athletic directors just days after ESPN aired a program outlining rape allegations against Cougar football players and other problems with the program was only coincidence. That one had nothing to do with the other.

Even if we assume that's true, it still looks like cause-and- effect. And that's the way it was reported -- or at least the way it was strongly insinuated -- on ESPN and other national outlets.

E-mail: pierce@desnews.com