Rico Beard doesn’t want to hear your complaints. If you love college football, you need to get used to the new television distribution model. That means you better have Peacock.
Wednesday afternoon on 97.1 The Ticket in Detroit, Beard reviewed the Big Ten schedule released earlier that day. He zeroed in on games involving both Michigan and Michigan State that would be available only on the streaming service.
Michigan, who has been to the last two College Football Playoffs, only has one Peacock exclusive, but it is their season opener against East Carolina. For Michigan State though, its best non-conference game is not going to be available on linear television.
“This is one right here – Michigan State/Washington, probably the second or third biggest game on their schedule at home this year. You can go to the home game, but if you want to watch it, Peacock Network, plain and simple,” Beard said.
When the Big Ten negotiated its new television deals last year, then-commissioner Kevin Warren seemingly followed a model similar to the NFL. The league spread it’s games out over three broadcast networks and chose not to do deals with streaming services. Still, NBC negotiated some games as Peacock exclusives as part of their package of primetime games.
Many people in The Ticket’s listening audience already have access to Peacock. The Detroit market is served by XFinity, which like Peacock and NBC, is owned by Comcast. Access to Peacock is included with a cable subscription.
Between that kind of access in the market and people’s consumption habits for entertainment that isn’t sports, he doesn’t understand why people complain about finding and watching Peacock.
“You found every way to watch shows on Netflix. You know what that is?” He asked his producer David Hull. “It’s streaming.”
Mike Valenti had Wednesday off. Rico Beard said he was glad that his partner was not there for this discussion, because they look at streaming sports very differently.
“He would just be hitting the ceiling right now. ’Everything is changed. I don’t like change. The world got me. Oh, I don’t like this,’” he said, impersonating Valenti. “It just it is what it is. I’ve been trying to explain to people when everybody made fun of me. Guys, college football, you’re not going to see it and watch it the same way you always have done it. It’s going to get different.”
