UPDATE:
Cox Sports has confirmed that they WILL be airing the 3 LSU games of the Shriner’s Classic this weekend. They even put out a fancy trailer for it.
Also, all teams are saying that all nine games of the series will stream live on MLB.com for free. I’ll update this post again with a direct link when it’s available.
“Texas, it’s like a whole ‘nother country”
It certainly feels like it whenever LSU Baseball heads west. Aside from the SEC outpost of College Station, there’s always some kind of hoop to jump through when we want to watch our Tigers play in the Lone Star State. Last time, I showed you how to access the Longhorn Network for free for a weekend instead of wrecking your cable bill to watch what turned out to be a disastrous road series in Austin. This weekend, the Tigers head to Minute Maid Park for another year of the Shriners Hospitals for Children College Classic, a series of SEC-BXII matchups that showcase some of the best college baseball in the country and raises money for a great cause.
Unfortunately, because this series is at Minute Maid Park, the Astros and their sub-standard television station have the broadcast rights.* Which means that in order to watch this weekend, you’ll need access to the Astros regional sports network, ATT Sportsnet Southwest.
Fans of the site will know that my abusive relationship with the Astros has had it’s ups and downs in recent years, from hundred loss seasons, to the drafting of Alex Bregman and the 2017 Championship, to last year’s boneheaded PR disasters and now the sign stealing scandal that has made them the pariah of the baseball world.
But through all of it, there has been one constant.
Their TV network is garbage run by garbage people.
In 2014, in a effort solely out of greed, the Astros ended their TV partnership with Fox Sports to go into a joint venture with then Comcast to form a new TV station. Eight years later
pause for emphasis
EIGHT
YEARS
LATER
that station, which has already gone bankrupt once, is still not available on hardly any of cable systems in Louisiana at any price. Xfinity customers up in Shreveport/Monroe still have it, the height of irony given their much closer proximity to Dallas and the Rangers, but everyone else in this state is shit out of luck. Through it’s bankruptcy and the DirecTV/ATT merger, the station is now available on satellite, but you don’t need me to tell you no team is worth dealing with a dish service to watch, let alone 3 LSU games over a weekend.
You would also think that, in the modern glorious age of OTT Streaming TV services, there would be plenty of online solutions, but alas, dear reader, the Garbage People who run the ATT Sportsnet stations (Astros, Rockies, and Pirates) don’t know anything about this new fangled “intermanet” you young’ns are talking about. Throughout all of baseball, these three teams (and the Cubs to an extent, but let’s not get into that) are the only ones whose stations cannot be found on most of the OTT services out there. This includes ATT Now, ATT’s own OTT streaming service. It would be funny if it wasnt so stupid.
Thankfully, there is one beacon of hope, and that’s FuboTV. In what almost seems like a mistake or a glitch, Fubo is the only streaming service to carry the ATT Sportsnets. Readers will remember that Fubo comes up frequently in our semi-annual cord cutting guides as an interesting option that is ultimately a non-starter for LSU fans because they don’t carry any of the ESPN stations. However, for this weekend, they’ll be perfect.
And free. Gloriously Free. Fubo offers a totally free 1 week trial that will cover this weekend’s games in Houston. Like with our past recommendation of using PS Vue to get Longhorn Network free for a weekend, you’ll need to remember to cancel after Sunday.
Being an Astros fan has given me a decade of tremendous highs and unimaginable lows, and through it all the one constant is that I have to use Russian streaming sites or VPN relocation tools just to watch the team I like. Thankfully, LSU fans will not have to endure the nonsense I have to deal with every spring.
*During the game at Nicholls last week, Ronnie Rantz said that Cox Sports would carry the LSU games of the Classic. However, I believe he was mistaken. Cox Sports’ program guide for the weekend currently doesn’t list any of the games and they’re scheduled to air college basketball at the time of Saturday’s game. If you’re on Cox cable, maybe you’ll get lucky? See Update