Angry College Football Fans: It's not our fault!!!!!

It seems as if I write this blog every college football season, but it needs to be mentioned as often as possible.

Like many of you, I'd love to be watching the Georgia/Oklahoma State game right now, but unfortunately, ABC has us showing the Baylor/Wake Forest game. WPDE knows the passion of college football fans in our area and that's why our management has secured the SEC regional package (the 12:30 pm Saturday games that air on CW 21) as well as additional college games whenever we can carry them (two CCU games will air on CW 21 as well).

Our general manager, Billy Huggins, was well aware that fans here would much rather see Georgia/Oklahoma State than Baylor/Wake Forest. For the past 10 years I've been working at WPDE, the 3:30 ABC game has always been the ACC game in the regional lineup. It doesn't matter if #1 is playing #2 in the nation, if there is a 3:30 game, we will have the ACC game - mark it down - it will be that way the rest of the season to the best of my knowledge.

Our GM requested to air the Georgia/Oklahoma State game and offered to put both games on (Baylor/Wake on WPDE, Georgia/Oklahoma State on CW21). ABC turned that request down.

I don't know what else we can do as a station. If we had the ability to choose the 3:30 or 8:00 pm Saturday games on ABC, I'd put a poll on our website every Monday and announce which game got the most votes on Wednesday and tell the network which game we want. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.

A lot of times when you call and complain to the station on the weekend, there are not a lot of people working and fans get more frustrated by not getting a straight answer. This is the straight answer. It doesn't make it any better and it will not fix the problem. It probably is of little consolation, but WPDE does care about its college football fans and we do the best we can to communicate our programming before the game to let people have a chance to find a way to watch the game.

If anyone wants the number to ABC to complain, I'll get it in the office and Monday and be more than happy to pass it along on this blog post.