About a week after Jim Delany, Big Ten commissioner, threw a hissy fit about comments he didn’t actually hear from a Comcast executive about the Big Ten Network, the cable channel — and its plans to steal Ohio State football from me — is now garnering the attention of Congress.

The Dispatch — and others — ran a story today about U.S. Rep. John Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, contacting Delany about getting his hands on some additional information about the network, its negotiations with cable companies across the country and the network’s plans to ensure that Uncle Crappy cannot watch all the Ohio State football games he is entitled to see.

OK. Dingell may not be especially concerned about that last point, but he’s apparently heard enough questions from Wolverine fans/alumni in his Michigan district that he wants some answers:

While I understand the motivation on the part of the Big Ten Conference and its member schools to create a new all-Big Ten cable channel, I am increasingly concerned about the migration of previously free, over the air content to a pay television tier.

Let’s read between the lines a little bit here. When Dingell says the Big Ten Network will take football games and move them to a “pay television tier,” I’m wondering if he’s thinking like I am — that there’s no way in hell BTN is going to A) charge Midwestern cable companies $1.10 per subscriber and B) keep its channel on a basic cable tier at the same time.

That’s problem No. 1: BTN has grossly overestimated its value, and I’m having a hard time believing cable companies are going pay that kind of money and be willing to keep the network as a basic cable channel at the same time.  When I wrote about this a few days back, I mentioned the trouble the NFL Network had in convincing cable carriers to pick up their channel — and they were only asking for 70 cents per subscriber.

Stewart Mandel writes today on SI.com that Delany is counting on our loyalty to the conference when it comes time to take sides — and by that I mean when football season is just three weeks away and the network doesn’t yet have agreements with Comcast, Time Warner and the other cable big-shots:

In his ongoing quarrel with Comcast, Time Warner and the rest of the nation’s cable providers, the commissioner is counting on the assumption that the public — particularly in Big Ten country — will fall on his side.

If that’s the case, Jimmy’s dead wrong. I hate everyone who’s even remotely involved with this process.  I hate the conference for screwing up its already beautiful television/cable package with this blatent money grab. I hate the cable companies because they’ve repeatedly demonstrated that the wishes of their viewers is generally the last thing they consider when making a decision, if they consider it at all.

Delany’s long been a model college conference commissioner, demonstrating the kind of vision that kept the Big Ten at the top of the college athletics heap, even through times when it probably didn’t deserve to be. But lately there have been problems with Delany’s very public displays of foot-in-mouth disease. Besides the miscalculations of BTN’s value, he’s slammed the academics of the Southeastern Conference schools after Florida waxed my Buckeyes in January and, about a week ago, he demanded an apology from Comcast over a slight that didn’t actually happen (as explained in Mandel’s SI story):

Delany had apparently confused the article with a memo Comcast recently circulated entitled “Get the Real Facts about the Big Ten Network,” which included the following line: “Indiana basketball fans don’t want to pay to watch Iowa volleyball.”

Without the gender reference, and when placed in that context, the comment quickly goes from the realm of inflammatory to … well, the truth.

The first instance makes Delany sound like a crybaby; the second makes him sound desperate — a man who is watching his hard work crumble before his eyes. I don’t know if that’s the case here or not — in part because BTN keeps saying they have 40 cable companies on board without disclosing who those partners are — but I know we’ll find out for sure later this summer. If August rolls around and Delany starts urging Big Ten fans to become subscribers of DirecTV — pretty much the only big-name provider BTN has actually named — we’ll know for sure that the Big Ten has bitten off much more than it could actually chew.