This, boys and girls, is not good.

The Dispatch tells us today that the new Big Ten Network plans on airing three Ohio State football games this season — the two openers against Youngstown State Sept. 1 and Akron Sept. 8, and a yet-to-be-announced conference game later in the season.

The non-conference games won’t bother me too much, because we’ll be there for both of them. But the Big Ten game later in the season … if that’s a road game, there’s a decent chance I’ll be stuck listening on the radio. And that is guaranteed to put Uncle Crappy in a foul mood.

As much as I bitch about the rules and decisions that keep me from viewing my Ohio sports — here and here are a couple of recent examples — it shouldn’t come as a suprise to anyone that I’d find the notion of being completely reliant on the decision of a cable company to carry the Big Ten Network to be more than a little irritating.

Remember the NFL Network’s PR problems a year ago? The league tried to strong-arm cable companies into carrying their channel, and many of the cable companies told them to go to hell. And that left a whole buncha football fans were left out of the loop when it came to the NFL Network’s exclusive Thursday night games.

I can easily see that happening on Saturdays as well. BTN says they have agreements with 40 cable companies across the country — although they’re not yet naming those partners — as well as a contract with DirectTV. But so far, they’re not playing nice with Comcast, which provides cable service to much of the Pittsburgh area, and they don’t have an agreement with Time Warner or Wowway, the biggies in Columbus.

BTN has exclusive rights to 35 football games this year, mostly games that ABC/ESPN weren’t interested in (can you beleive ABC didn’t want to the rights to the titanic struggle against Youngstown State? Yeah, I can’t either…). I can easily see a time, perhaps after the current ABC/ESPN contract expires, when that number doubles. And if you don’t have BTN by that time, boys and girls, you’re going to be screwed.

I’m hoping that the fact that my cable provider, Armstrong, provides service in both Pennsylvania and Northeast Ohio will mean that BTN would be a natural for them. But given that they taking the same road the NFL did — pushing for inclusion in basic packages rather than as a subscription service — I’m not at all confident that I’ll be getting BTN on my cable system anytime soon.

I know — I’m a little spoiled here. I’m old enough to remember the time when the only the Michigan game — and perhaps one other per season, if we were lucky — was broadcast on television. If you didn’t have tickets, you were stuck listening to Marv Homan on the radio. But that water went over the dam a long time ago, and I fear the expectation I share with millions of others — that Ohio State football will be on TV, one place or another — is going to be crushed sometime here in the near future.