College football to rule airwaves this weekend Viewing options differ slightly from last year

College football will hit the television and radio airwaves in earnest this weekend as it is the first “full” schedule with Division I action in each region of the country.

Although the University of Maine doesn’t kick off until next weekend and the CBB (Colby, Bates, Bowdoin) teams don’t open play until Sept. 20, there will be plenty of pigskin action available on local TV screens.

Cablevision of Bangor will once again offer weekly, pay-per-view games in addition to the national “free” games televised on ABC and ESPN.

There are some new wrinkles in 1997 Greater Bangor version of ESPN Gameplan: Cablevision is no longer offering the complete package for a special price and the per-week cost has jumped $2.

Not all the changes are bad, however, as viewers can take advantage of two games for the price of one at least six times this season. On these double feature Saturdays, viewers will get two games – at noon and 3:30 p.m. – for the same $11.95 PPV charge that’s assessed on single-game days such as Saturday, when the national (3:30 p.m.) game on ABC is Miami at Baylor and the lone PPV game is the UCLA at Washington State contest. There is no noon game.

Cablevision sales manager Deb Chapman said there are two reasons why the 14-game season package is not available for a special price ($69 last year).

“There was, I think, only one person who bought it and we couldn’t seem to overcome some technical glitches where some games were still being blacked out even though he had bought the whole package,” she explained.

As before, Cablevision will receive notification from ESPN each Monday which game will be available on PPV. ESPN, not Cablevision, picks which games will be available as pay-per-views.

“I suppose if we had a Cindy Blodgett type of player who went on to play on the West Coast or something, we could probably request a certain game, but barring that, we take what ESPN sends us,” Chapman explained.

Subscribers wanting to order games can call Cablevision at 942-4661 or ESPN Gameplan at 1-800-597-4075. The toll-free number is only for orders and will not provide information on which games are available. To find out which games are on, viewers will have to either call Cablevision or read the NEWS’ TV-Radio Schedule in the sports pages.

New England Sports Network has also announced its fall college football schedule. NESN’s 38-game schedule begins Saturday with a FOX Sports Net-produced Big 12 game – Oklahoma State at Iowa State – at 6:30 p.m.

As it has for the past three seasons, NESN is televising several Eastern College Athletic Conference games. Unlike the past two seasons, this season’s ECAC broadcast schedule does not include any Maine teams, such as ECAC members Bowdoin and Colby, each of which had one of their games televised over the last two seasons.

Bangor all-sports radio station WZON (620 AM) is airing its second major college football game this weekend – Texas Tech at Tennessee – Saturday night. The Sports Zone will air about a dozen games, including regular season and most of the major bowl games, from the CBS Radio and Westwood One networks.