The end of ESPN Classic?

[Rupert Patrick]

I noticed ESPN Classic is being dropped from my ATT UVerse cable tomorrow. After doing some more digging, they seem to no longer be available on any of the major non-satellite cable providers at this time. I know they didn't carry pro football but I always watched a lot of ESPN Classic over the years, still do, particularly baseball and college football. It appears ESPN is in the process of phasing out ESPN Classic, although I do think there is a place in the cable universe for such a network, provided they play old NFL games also.

[vikingsfan1963]

This channel was pure gold at one time. Now, it's mostly college football, college basketball, some MLB, and some boxing. I watched it ever since it was the Classic Sports Network before ESPN took it over.

[7DnBrnc53]

Interesting. I thought that it had already been over for quite sometime.

[Reaser]

This channel was pure gold at one time. Now, it's mostly college football, college basketball, some MLB, and some boxing. I watched it ever since it was the Classic Sports Network before ESPN took it over.

Yup! It was must-watch in the early days. Internet, youtube, downloading, streaming, explosion of sports networks that show their own replays, etc, and that they seemingly don't show the content they used to -though still will watch a game on there here and there- has essentially taken away it's niche. Is interesting this came up, though. A month back I set the DVR for a 1995 USC-UW replay and I thought to myself that it was the first time I was going to watch (or even record) something from ESPNClassic in a while.

[RyanChristiansen]

The ESPN+ app may someday include old games. You can currently watch a old Ali fights, but not much else for classic content yet.

[Rupert Patrick]

This channel was pure gold at one time. Now, it's mostly college football, college basketball, some MLB, and some boxing. I watched it ever since it was the Classic Sports Network before ESPN took it over.

They played the short-lived Joe Namath talk show series from 1969 at one point about 20 years back, I remember recording all the episodes. I think they could have dug deeper into the sports vaults than they did. In the past couple weeks they replayed the same half-dozen old Michigan-Ohio State football games incessantly (1969, 1974, 1977, 1979, and a couple more recent) as opposed to trying to find other classic college football rivalry games that were going on this weekend like Auburn-Alabama, Minnesota-Wisconsin, Georgia-Georgia Tech or just went for some past classic rivalry games like USC-UCLA or Pitt-Penn State instead of showing the same 1969 Michigan-Ohio State game about six times over the course of two weeks.

[lastcat3]

Yeah not much need for it these days with platforms like youtube available. You can get all kinds of old games on youtube. If youtube attempts to take them down someone else just uploads them right back on.

[sheajets]

I remember when it first came on, think it was either 1995 or 1996, it showed so many things you hadn't seen for ages and with no youtube yet...I mean where else could you watch game 7 of the 75 world series in its entirety or Game 6 Isles/Flyers 1980. Or so many great Ali moments or NFL Films masterpieces.

[lastcat3]

I remember when it first came on, think it was either 1995 or 1996, it showed so many things you hadn't seen for ages and with no youtube yet...I mean where else could you watch game 7 of the 75 world series in its entirety or Game 6 Isles/Flyers 1980. Or so many great Ali moments or NFL Films masterpieces.

Yep back in those days you pretty much had to look for advertisements of people who were selling them. Back around the time you were speaking of one of my friends saw an advertisement in a magazine he got from the school library about a guy who was selling some old games. We ended up getting a few ('81 Dolphins/Chargers and Super Bowl III were two of them (think there was one more though can't remember which one). Of course we ended up paying way more than we should have but you didn't have really any other options back then and the people selling them knew it, lol.

The idea of having an old game was a lot cooler back then as you couldn't just pop on the internet and read all about it and get all the stats and what not.