Look out ESPN, here comes the American Sports Network

 Ok, so I just wanted to make the title sound interesting. Starting this fall fans will be able to watch college athletics on a new home, the American Sports Network. The American Sports Network, or ASN as it will be most commonly called, is a new network owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Basically Sinclair Broadcast Group is entering into live sports broadcast. They will produce more than 200 live events each season that Sinclair stations can pick up for broadcast. Most of the games will air on CW and My Network TV owned stations, but bigger named groups can pick up games that don't conflict with their regular schedules.Currently only Sinclair stations have the rights to the games, but they are in talks with other interested stations about making it a regional package outside of Sinclair.

To date ASN has five conferences that have signed up with them: Conference USA, the Big South, the CAA, the SoCon, and the Patriot League. So far Sinclair's schedule for CUSA and the SoCon has been announced. Events on American Sports Network include college football, men's and women's college basketball, women's college soccer, and college baseball to start with.

Most ASN games will not be streamed on ESPN3, though some may end up due to the conferences affiliations with ESPN (SoCon). However individual stations airing the games will have the rights to stream them on their websites. Conference USA has already announced that the games for them ill be streamed on the C-USA Digital Network, and the CAA has confirmed that CAA.Tv will carry their games. The new network acts as a supplement to games that have already been picked up by each conferences main broadcast partners and does not replace any current existing contracts.

And that is it for now. Look forward to seeing what games get selected by ASN when I publish the weekly schedules later this year. Or you can head over to mattsarzsports.com to take a look at the football broadcast schedules and see which ones ASN has already picked up for CUSA and the SoCon.