Today you are fortunate. Below is a special guest post on Gopher Gold from Judd Zulgad, the TV sports critic. This is what Judd has to say about the NCAA hockey playoffs: 

If you’re a college hockey fan, this isn’t a good weekend to be a Comcast subscriber. ESPNU, which isn’t carried by the cable system, will air eight games of the men’s hockey tournament exclusively. This includes the title game from the Northeast Regional in Worcester, Mass. Of course, if the Gophers are able to get by Boston College in the semifinals, they will advance to that game. (FSN North will pick up the ESPN regional production of the Gophers-BC at 6:30 p.m. Saturday.) An ESPN spokesperson said this week that the network and Comcast officials are in talks about ESPNU but certainly nothing will get done by this weekend. What makes this a somewhat confusing situation is that Comcast carries no less than six ESPN channels (ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN News, ESPN Classic come to mind). One would think it shouldn’t have been a problem to work out something for ESPNU. Usually problems are caused when a network is launched by a company or entity that wasn’t previously in the television business. The Twins’ short-lived Victory Sports One venture and the Big Ten Network come to mind. A Comcast executive was asked the question about ESPNU this week and here’s a partial part of a statement they sent: “Comcast does not carry ESPNU and has no imminent plans to do so. It is unfortunate that ESPN has decided to air these popular regional hockey games on ESPNU, their least available channel, effectively depriving local fans of these games. These games have traditionally been available to local fans on regionally distributed networks or broadcast outlets; unfortunately, as rights holder, ESPN has made the decision to limit distribution of the games this year.”

No doubt, ESPN officials are hoping that upset fans will call Comcast and complain. ESPNU, which launched in March 2005 and reaches 20 million homes, does have deals with Charter and Mediacom cable systems as well as DirecTV (Ch. 609) and Dish Network (Ch. 148).

Here’s a list of the games that ESPNU will have exclusively.

NORTHEAST REGIONAL

– Air Force-Miami, 3 p.m. Saturday

– Final, 3:30 p.m. Sunday

MIDWEST REGIONAL

– Final, 6 p.m. Sunday

EAST REGIONAL

– Clarkson-St. Cloud State, 3 p.m. Friday

– Michigan-Niagara, 6:30 p.m. Friday

– Final, 6 p.m. Saturday

WEST REGIONAL

– Colorado College-Michigan State, 9 p.m. Friday

– Final, 9 p.m. Saturday

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Gophers men's hockey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.