I’ve talked here about my morning routine before. What used to consist of eating a bowl of cereal, drinking a cup of coffee & sitting in front of the TV watching my TiVo-ed Sportscenter from the night before has evolved into catching the latest highlights via ESPN’s broadband video online. Nearly as good a quality of video coupled with selectable video clips means I get about the same coverage (at least in the things I’m really interested in) as before in a fraction of the time. That extra time gives me space to be able to check email & occasionally post a quick blog entry like this when something is on my mind.

But what about when there is specific coverage I’m looking for that ESPN doesn’t bring me? It doesn’t seem possible, but the fact is that ESPN doesn’t cover everything sports-related well. A prime example of this is the OU coverage by the network. Regardless of what anyone says, it’s hard to get away from feeling like there is an anti-Big 12 bias when it comes to sports coverage by ESPN. USC could be playing Podunk University and it will receive crazy coverage. Unless OU is playing a team like Miami you would be hard pressed to find much, if anything, about the Sooners game.

One of the stipulations of moving from Oklahoma to Tennessee nearly three years ago was that I felt a requirement had to be adding the college football package to DirecTV so I could still watch the Sooners play every weekend (like I enjoyed living in Edmond, and even southeast Kansas for that matter). This doesn’t guarantee that we get to see them play every game, although with OU being ranked so highly year after year it helps fill in the gaps from games not covered on TV nearly completely.

The one exception seems to be that they (not even sure who they are who make these decisions) pick one game - usually against a no-name school - and make it a full-fledged Pay-Per-View event. They did it last year with MTSU (Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, about 30 minutes southeast of Nashville). Of course with MTSU being in our backyard we could have paid to see the game here - for a mere $40-50 (no thanks). This year’s no-view game? The Utah State game from last weekend.

So, I get online at the beginning of the week, desperately searching for some kind of highlights to watch (after all, OU is #3 in the country) and my ESPN daily routine fails me. So what is a longing Sooner fan left to do when the Sports Super-Channel doesn’t bring the coverage? Hit YouTube, of course :-)

The clips below were just what I needed. The great thing is that while ESPN had no video coverage of the game (apart from a 10 second “OU kicked their opponents tail again” segment), YouTube offers a plethora of choices from fans like me (albeit ones who live where they actually broadcast all the games) have diligently spliced up the game film in order to offer me a bite-size version chock full of highlights.

If you’re not a Sooners fan, I’m sure you’ve already quit reading some time ago :-) For anyone else who is interested, here are some highlights of the Utah State game, as well as the 2007 intro video for the team…

Visit TheEdigers.com to see the videos...

Oklahoma 54 - Utah State 3

Oklahoma 2007 Intro Video