The short answer is that the Steve in Iowa household has no cable.  Or satellite.  We regard those services as luxuries not worth the cost.  (Seriously, people.  Look at your monthly cable bill, multiply it by 12 and see if that service is something you really, really need.)

Now until the past few seasons this choice was never all that great of a sacrifice. You remember the old days when all the major sporting events you wanted to watch could be seen on broadcast television?  Of course we no longer live in the “old days.”

Alas, it is truly a brave new world constructed by our wise and generous cable television over-lords.  Whereas once our betters might have been enlightened enough to regard college football as a quasi-public trust, part of our shared cultural heritage and worthy to be brought to the masses, the unholy alliance between the NCAA and the modern day cable-television feudal barons at Disney/ABC/ESPN have decreed that every available ounce of revenue MUST be plundered from this public trust.  And so, this is my personal congratulations to Disney for shifting all the good bowl programming to the four-letter.   You really are genius rentiers.

Apologies for the political digression.

Of course I could still see the game.  I could go over to the neighbor’s to watch the game.  Or go to the pub.  But that would require inviting myself to the neighbors’ and inconveniencing them.  Or spending too much money on beer and snacks at the pub.  All for a game that I have zero emotional stake in.

I just. Can’t. Get. Excited. For. This. Game.

I’m sorry, SEC. You just aren’t THAT good to force a rematch of one of the ugliest games of all time on the rest of the country.

On the other hand, were this LSU vs. Oklahoma State?  I would be all over that action.  But we don’t live in that world.  We live in the world where this happened:

And in this world, one of the injustices is that Iowa State will be remembered as the team that ruined Oklahoma State’s shot at the national title, instead of potentially being the only team to beat the national champion in 2011.