Cord Cutting Guide for Sports Fans

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(link to my other Cord Cutting guide posts)

First, let’s talk about College Football.

I posted last year that my experience with CBS College Sports Live was a bummer, as I could not get it to work on my Roku Boxes or Roku TV.

Happily, it worked just fined during the 2017 Football season.

The first thing I discovered is that you can ‘mirror’ your tablet or your phone to a Roku device (assuming the Roku device was made some time after around 2014).  So I had a work-around in place this year to run CBS College Sports Live from my $80 android tablet and ‘mirror’ it to my Roku TV in case the Roku app hiccupped again.

I also re-tried using the College Sports Live App on my Roku devices.  Happily, it worked just fine during this year’s college football season.  It could be that CBS updated their app, or that I went to the next-higher internet speed with my cable company (for a lower price with no contract, but that’s another post) a few months ago.

So I managed to catch all of my favorite college football team (GO NAVY!) home games without a hitch during the season for about $30 ($9.99 for September, October, and November).  College Sports Live also has the ‘On Demand’ feature, so you don’t have to worry about a DVR or cloud storage for your team if they are one of the schools covered by College Sports Live.

Now, on to Baseball.

For us Padres Fans, baseball season was over some time around June, but I wanted to figure out a way to catch live Padres games without a Cable/Satellite TV contract.

After much research, I opted for a free one-week trial of the Sling Blue package, which included the local San Diego Fox Sports channel.  Sling Blue has a great sports package for $25 per month,  including the aforementioned local Fox Sports, and NBCSN (sports network).

Then There’s Cycling.

Yes, Cycling is a freak show, but for some reason I enjoy watching the Tour every year.  I watched for about a week this past year using the one week free trial of Sling Blue.  However, I quickly lost interest in the Tour and got my fill after Cavendish crashed out and Peter Sagan was DQ’d the next morning.  Having satisfied my curiosity that I could watch my favorite baseball team and the Tour for a reasonable price each month, I cancelled Sling Blue after the 1 week free trial was up.

I have also used NBC Sports Gold in the past to watch the Tour, but there’s no need to spend the $30 per year on this if you already have Sling Blue.

So there you have it – $325 for the year ($25 per month for Sling Blue plus $30 during football season for CBS College Sports Live) can fill the sports void in our house.

Beats the pants off of $1000 per year for a Cable/Satellite contract!

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