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ESPN, the official television partner of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament, has announced the times and broadcast details for the first round.
#5 seed Marquette will play #12 seed Quinnipiac in Coral Gables, Florida, at 12:30pm Central. The game will be broadcast on ESPN2, but there’s a little bit of a catch. See, The Worldwide Leader is only putting women’s hoops on ESPN2, so that’s the only channel carrying any of the four games that are being played at that time. Thus, only part of the country is going to get the full MU game, and by part, I mean a very small section. Here’s the map from ESPN:
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So, yeah. Congratulations to everyone in Wisconsin and Connecticut, you’ll get to see the whole game on TV. Condolences to everyone in California, New Mexico, Iowa, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Cincinnati metro area, and the Ice Station Zebra section of New York, as you have no chance of seeing any of the game on TV. The rest of the country gets “whip-around coverage,” which means you have to wait for ESPN2 to swing back around to the Marquette game and/or hope that all of the other games are blowouts but MU is close with QU. Let’s be honest, we would prefer that to not happen.
For everyone outside of Wisconsin and Connecticut, I do have a bit of good news. The Marquette game will be carried in its entirety on WatchESPN. You’re all smart people living in the 21st Century, so fire up your favorite device or whatever works for you to catch the Golden Eagles against the Bobcats on Saturday afternoon.
UPDATE: It appears that if you have DirecTV, you’ll be able to watch the whole game, regardless of your location.
@AnonymousEagle FYI if you want to add to your post, DirecTV has dedicated subchannels for the WBB tournament. Looks like #muwbb is on 789.
— Danny Manson (@mansond) March 18, 2017