Great deity TV often forces fans into submission

For anyone who has missed a game because television switched to a day when you had to work, or has gone to a game only to find an empty arena because the starting time was changed, here’s someone you should thank.

He’s Rudy Davalos, director of athletics at the University of New Mexico. Earlier this week he did something unheard of in sports these days – he told television to shove it.

More specifically, he told ESPN he wasn’t going to switch a basketball game against No. 13 Utah from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Monday night because the network liked it better than the scheduled game between Wyoming and San Diego State.

Davalos hardly gave it a second thought. He wasn’t going to make 17,000 fans figure out how to switch baby sitters at the last minute, find a way to keep kids awake past midnight or survive at work the next day on just a few hours of sleep.

Send Rudy an e-mail. Give him a call. It’s not often someone in sports comes down on the side of fans who actually dig in their pockets to go see games.

“Ten o’clock mountain time is a horrible time to play a basketball game during the week,” Davalos said. “It means the game ends at 12:10, fans get home at 1 a.m. and then have to go to work the next day.”

Imagine that. Someone thinking of the fans and treating them properly. What a novel thought these days when television means money, money means everything and the lowly fan means little.

Maybe somebody should have told San Jose State that last year when the Spartans moved their football game against unbeaten Boise State to a 9 a.m. kickoff to accommodate ESPN. Sparty, the San Jose mascot, wore pajamas and a bathrobe, but less than 5,000 fans bothered to get up early to watch.

The Boise State players didn’t mind, even though they had to get up at 5 a.m. in the dark to play. This, though, is a school in the wilds of Idaho that is so starved for attention it paints its football field a garish hue of blue.

“If we can get on national TV again, we’ll play at 6 (a.m.) if we have to,” tackle Daryn Colledge said then.

Players, of course, are like most Americans. They’ve grown up in front of the TV and are so enthralled with the idea that they might actually appear on it that they’ll do just about anything to be on.

That’s why people don’t mind embarrassing themselves on “American Idol,” or doing stupid things on “Fear Factor.”

It’s why at a baseball game there’s some idiot in the front row behind home plate waving his arms wildly and telling someone at the other end of a cell phone to watch him wave his arms wildly.

It’s why students jump up and down and yell and scream when ESPN’s college pregame show goes to campuses, and why people stand behind the Fox Sports studio glass at Staples Center after the Los Angeles Lakers’ games trying desperately to get someone to see them.

They don’t realize that no one is watching.

With 200 or so channels available on digital cable or satellite, there’s plenty of other shows to choose from, something the Mountain West Conference finally figured out when it decided to leave ESPN next year for a new deal with CSTV Networks.

ESPN was paying the conference about $7 million a year for the rights to carry Mountain West football and basketball games. That’s hardly BCS money, but the $800,000 a year or so each school got helped pay some bills.

In return, the Mountain West sold out its fans. It agreed to move some football games with as little as six days’ notice, and to play Monday basketball games at 10 p.m.

Coaches, of course, believe national television exposure will get them recruits. But an ESPN game that starts at midnight Eastern time draws only about a half million viewers, most of them probably half asleep in their easy chairs.