1 - For it's coverage of the Big 10 Championship Game, Fox Sports will utilize the Big 10 Network studio team and #1 announcing team and with their presentation of the Big 10 Championship Game, Fox will have learned what they did wrong and right they did with with their coverage of the BCS.
2 - ESPN will pull the plug on ESPN Classic and will rebrand the channel into an "ESPNU2" channel with heavy focus on Texas and SEC Olympic sports along with college football and basketball telecasts that were once exclusively on ESPN3.com.
3 - Fox Sports will rebrand one of their existing Fox College Sports digital channels into the new Pac 12 Network.
4 - ESPN gets back into the NHL business with a new joint TV contract with NHL and the new NBC Sports Channel, which will happen upon the completion of the Comcast/NBC merger and the subsequent rebranding of VERSUS into the NBC Sports Channel.
5 - With the BCS moving to ESPN starting with the Bowl Games on January 1, 2011, there won't be a ratings decline.
6 - NASCAR ratings continue it's free fall in 2011.
7 - In major Comcast markets like Seattle, Pittsburgh, and Denver, DirecTV will use their ownership of Fox Sports Northwest, Fox Sports Rocky Mountain, and Fox Sports Pittsburgh as leverage to get satellite carriage of Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia and Comcast SportsNet Northwest. DirecTV will play hardball with Comcast and tell the nation's largest cable provider to let them carry CSN Philadelphia and CSN Northwest or DirecTV will pull their regional sports networks off of Comcast lineups in Seattle, Denver, and Pittsburgh.
With The University of Texas and the Pac 12 wanting to launch their own cable channels, I think the key issue with getting their new channels off the ground is going to be getting carriage agreements with the major cable and satellite companies and avoiding what the Big 10 went through with the launch of the Big 10 Network.
In fact, I could see the Pac 12 giving joint ownership rights of their new network to the major cable companies, similar to what MLB did with it's MLB Network which is why when MLB Network launched in 2009, it launched in 50 some million homes.
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