At the core of the public spat between the Big Ten Network and the Comcast behemoth was a seemingly innocuous comment — “Indiana basketball fans don’t want to watch Iowa volleyball” — that prompted Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany to get defensive.
In picking a fight with Comcast, the largest cable provider in the country (24 milllion-plus subscribers as of December 2006), Delany may have violated the No. 1 Rule of Confrontation: Don’t pick a fight you can’t win.