This week, it was announced that ESPN+ will be picking up some Big East sports.  This will not resemble the Big Monday's of yesteryear when ESPN and the Big East put each other on the map with outstanding conference basketball matchups.  In fact, much of this deal will be to show sports outside of Men's Basketball.  However, if DePaul-Providence is for you, you may now be seeing this on the Plus.  The deal works for the Big East who can now claim to again be in business with the worldwide leader, even if the majority of offerings will be pedestrian at best.  It especially works for ESPN who is launching a direct-to-consumer streaming product soon (which will include all ESPN programming including ESPN+ and can use all of the sports programming it can get).

The entity that loses in this scenario is our beloved Flo Hoops.  To the uninitiated, Flo Hoops is a streaming service that largely is in business to show minor conference basketball, though even the 9th place vs. 10th place Big East games had to carry some cache in comparison.  Several times, GW has participated in a holiday MTE where Flo Hoops owned the streaming rights.  This meant paying an exorbitant sum by comparison, say $25 to watch three GW games with exceptionally poor production value, followed by making painstaking attempts to cancel the service (which admittedly has received mixed reviews here regarding the ease involved in doing so).

I can't begin to tell you the first thing about the balance sheet of Flo Hoops and more specifically, how much of its performance is contingent upon bringing in Big East fans as subscribers.  Those folks are surely out the door now, leaving me to wonder whether there are enough CAA fans willing to stream Flo Hoops in order to keep them in business.   Worth keeping an eye on for no other reason than Flo had last season's Cayman Island games, and GW will be playing there in 2025.(though these games do not yet appear on Flo's 2025 schedule).