ESPN3: The Home of ACC Football

The ACC announced game times (PDF) for several of its early-season football games, including two more involving Virginia Tech. The start times for the Hokies' games against Boise State and Georgia Tech had previously been announced, but Thursday morning we learned when kickoff will be for the games against James Madison and East Carolina.

Both of those two games will start at 1:30 p.m. EDT and be shown on ESPN3.com. In fact, 11 of the games announced by the conference today for the first three weeks of the season will be shown on ESPN3.

The good news is all but two of those games (VT vs. ECU and Clemson vs. North Texas) involve FCS teams. These are games that prior to the new contract with ESPN would have been relegated to ACC Select or not shown anywhere.

While I do a lot of complaining about how many ACC games get stuck on ESPN3, at least they're no longer being shown on ACC Select. Games shown on Select were usually unwatchable because whatever servers the conference had running them could never handle the amount of people who wanted to watch the them. It led to a lot of buffering and a lot of wasted money by people like me who were willing to pay to watch his team play William & Mary on a horrible Internet stream.

At least that appears to be gone. What will be interesting is how many conference games get thrown onto ESPN3. Last year, it was a lot of them. The new ESPN contract means more games available, but I wonder how many of them will actually be on TV. Hopefully the only games relegated to the Internet will be ones involving cupcake non-conference teams.