The ESPN empire does not mimic a classless society.

The network makes little attempt to hide the hierarchy among its stations: ABC and the namesake station rule supreme, followed by ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN Regional, ESPN Classic. Chris Turner, ESPN Regional senior director of programming and events, said they are the ‘different tiers’ of television.

The differences were noticeable in the last two road games for the Syracuse men’s basketball team. Against DePaul in the middle of the week, the game was shown on ESPN Regional, which is not a channel, but an ESPN-produced gamecast airing on a local partner-channel (in this case, Time Warner Sports channel 26). Meanwhile, the matchup with Villanova led off a packed Saturday of college hoops on the flagship channel.

The scenario is the result of a Big East contract that stipulates all in-conference games must air somewhere within the ESPN/ABC universe. The process has become more complicated since the Big East moved to an 18-game schedule. And the consequence is Orange fans are left with a hodgepodge of announcers.

Case and point: Wednesday night in Chicago. Syracuse at DePaul lacked a nationwide audience, and it was relegated as an ESPN Regional production, the seventh this season.

Eric Collins and Mike Jarvis provided the audio. Collins has yet to call an SU game this year. Jarvis (who coached Patrick Ewing in high school, in case you missed his incessant mentions of it) provided the color analysis for the third time this season.

If the Big East did not have a contract that guarantees ESPN all its conference games (save a select few shown on CBS), viewers in Central New York could have had announcers who had been spent some substantial time around the team. The Chicago market could have had a set of DePaul guys calling the action with Blue Demon fans in mind.

Instead, without a national audience, the two home markets heard a blend of commentators that didn’t know either team very well.

Turner, from ESPN Regional, admits there is no dedicated effort to have school-specific or state-specific broadcasters. He said logistics – in which the announcers live and what other gigs they have – play the biggest role in who is assigned which games.

‘It’s just a big puzzle, and sometimes it’s the case where the pieces don’t fit,’ Turner said of scheduling all the games ESPN is committed to showing.

And it is not just with ESPN Regional broadcasts that announcer continuity is sacrificed. Since Big East play began, the Orange has not had a different pair of announcers call each game. Ten games have yielded 10 combinations.

Even during national broadcasts, the ever-changing groupings of play-by-play men and color commentators can leave the fans devoid of information people closer to the team would certainly be familiar with.

Saturday against Villanova, Scoop Jardine returned after being suspended two games by the university. The local media knew last Wednesday that Jardine had been suspended for his involvement in using another student’s SUID.

John Saunders and Len Elmore – doing their first SU game together this season – mentioned Jardine’s return, but failed to tell the home-viewing audience what the freshman guard had done wrong. Even worse, they acted as if no one knew why he had missed two games in the heart of the team’s Big East schedule.

He was suspended ‘for breaking school policy,’ Saunders said, that’s ‘what the standard is – the standard wording anyhow.’ Elmore chirped in with his own shallow information: ‘for violation of the school code of conduct.’

Yes, that was the standard wording that the university had been putting out, but anyone who follows the team knew last week that the police report had exposed exactly how Jardine had violated school policy.

Beyond missing that important fact, the pair’s analysis revealed their lack of familiarity as well. Neither Saunders nor Elmore brought it to the audience’s attention that Jardine’s return was especially significant for a depleted SU roster. Walk-on Justin Thomas was injured, and without Jardine there would have been no reasonably qualified substitute for the guard positions. It must not have been in their prep packet.

ESPN helps Big East schools reach more than 90 million homes when it puts the teams on its network. And assets like ESPN Regional help it to show every Syracuse game to the home market. Yet, is it too much to ask for some continuity of broadcasters?

At SU, people care about announcers. There is a habit of educating very famous ones, and that has created a culture that looks for through, quality broadcasting. It would be nice to have the worldwide leader in sports match the expectations of the school it is contractually committed to televising.

Matt Reilly is the sports and the media columnist for The Daily Orange where his columns appear bi-weekly. He can be reached at matt.s.reilly@gmail.com.

Published on February 4, 2008 at 12:00 pm