San Jose Mercury: Passing the buck on Cal-Wazzou blackout

If you're irked that Cal's game at Washington State won't be televised and looking for someone to blame, good luck.  It's not really the Pacific-10 Conference's fault. It's definitely not Cal's fault. And it's not Washington State's fault.  Here's what happened:

ABC and Fox Sports Net own the rights to Pac-10 games. Once they've made their selections, the rights to the remaining games are handled by the individual schools.  Problem is, schools can't arrange for local TV until they know which games ABC and FSN are selecting, and ABC waited until last week to pick UCLA-Oregon for Saturday's 12:30 p.m. slot.  By that time, Washington State had set the kickoff for 2 p.m. The Cougars approached FSN Northwest about carrying the game, but it went with Washington-Oregon State instead.  That left one option: Let Cal's partner, Comcast SportsNet West, handle the broadcast. But the game would have had to be moved to 7 p.m. to avoid conflicts with the ABC and FSN Northwest telecasts.  WSU couldn't find an independent station in its region to show the Comcast feed, so the Cougars refused to change the kickoff -- and for good reason: They would have pushed kickoff back by five hours and inconvenienced their homecoming crowd to show a game that was not going to be televised in their area and not going to earn them a dime.