I know quite a few people dropped cable because of the companies unchecked greed even some of the streaming services have spiked.They how ever told me they would have watched the game,some pubbed it.Advertisers aren't hamstrung by cable - they'll follow the viewing eyeballs
Totally understand and agree. Those people definitely exist.
I got rid of traditional cable/satellite (forgot which I was on at the time) as soon as SlingTV came out and had ESPN, because it was $20/month. I made the deliberate choice that I'd get ENOUGH of the college football and basketball content I needed, and chose to forgo BTN at the time. I'd be in a similar group to what you describe in that I'd be likely to watch BTN content
IF it were available on ESPN or OTA, but it wasn't important enough to justify a $100+ cable/satellite subscription 12 months out of the year for a few games.
Likewise there are people who have decided that sports, if they're not OTA, aren't important enough to justify a cable/satellite or live TV streaming service. Especially when you look at Hulu Live TV which was initially $39.99/mo when I joined, and is now $69.99/mo (now includes Disney+ and ESPN+ BTW, which it didn't then, but you now cannot get a plan w/o those). Prices keep going up...
I'm just saying it's a sliding scale. Die hard college football fans find it hard to ditch ESPN...
ESPN is just way too much of the available content, especially for fans of non-helmet teams that don't regularly get featured on Big Nude Saturday or the primetime ABC game. 9 of OSU's 12 games were on Fox or ABC, with only three on FS1 or BTN, and those were the Tulsa, Akron, and Rutgers games that weren't expected to be competitive anyway. Purdue had 4 of 12 games OTA, @ND (on NBC) and then games against top-10 Iowa, MSU, and OSU on ABC. Of the remainder, only one was even on an ESPN network, and that was ESPN2. Purdue had 4 on BTN, two on FS1, and one on CBSSN. For a Purdue fan, the
only games OTA were the ones we were predicted to lose by significant margins.
So respectfully, if you're mainly talking to OSU fans, things are a little different for y'all. You can forgo cable/streaming in favor of OTA because your team is regularly featured on OTA networks. For the rest of us... Not so much.