ESPN hates college baseball. — Me.

In short, ESPN regularly does a terrible job covering the early part of the NCAA Baseball Tournament and college baseball, in general. I suppose they don’t do any worse than NBC does with the Olympics, but that bar barely escapes the ground floor. From noon to midnight for three days (180 hours of programming space) ESPN will be broadcasting only 73 hours of live events. 41% of their weekend will be dedicated to actually showing you sporting events as opposed to opining on future or past events–that is, when they’re not telling you about who Rory McIlroy is dating today. The following is a run-down of ESPN’s anticipated live-tv coverage this week.

26 of those hours will be dedicated (mostly relegated to ESPNU) to the regionals of the NCAA Baseball Tournament
22 of those hours are invested in the Women’s College World Series–many of which, I’ll try and watch because I’ll be cheering on the Lady Ragin Cajuns!
7 hours for auto events
5 hours for nba finals
3 hours of baseball
2.5 hours of soccer
2.5 hours of arena football

In a weekend like the one we’re about to undergo with the first weekend of the NCAA tournament, there should be no shortage of high drama event hours to cover.

The below is a representation of this weekend’s regional series’ matched up against ESPN’s schedule listings. In green, I’ve noted the games that are announced or likely to be aired on the ESPN family of networks. In yellow are the games that are likely to be relegated to online viewing. In orange are ESPN’s broadcasts of live sporting events. Also in orange are the game candidates for live broadcast on start time and ESPN’s timeslots for college baseball TBA.