(January 11, 2011) The BCS Championship was not available on broadcast television for the first time ever Monday night, but ESPN was not apologizing for that, or anything else associated with its telecast of the college football national championship game.

Instead, senior executives for the cable sports giant prefer the word “sensitive.”

As in, “We’re sensitive to it.”

With more than 100 hours dedicated to the showdown between No. 1-ranked Auburn and No. 2 Oregon – including 20 straight hours on ESPNU leading up to the game – Burke Magnus, the senior vice president at ESPN for college sports programming, insisted the decision to put the BCS games, including the title championship, on its flagship channel was good for hardcore sports fans.

“In addition to television, obviously, we’re covering the games on ESPN radio,” Magnus said. “We are distributing the games internationally. They are being offered on our digital platforms like ESPN3.com and ESPN Mobile Television.

“We think the totality of our coverage and the sort of surrounding approach we’re taking to BCS content has offered fans more access to these games than ever before.”

Magnus dismissed the notion that putting the national championship on cable would deny those without it the opportunity to see the game.

“It is an issue that we’re mindful of, but at the same time, the approach we take is to try and make content available as widely as possible,” Magnus said. “And we really believe based on our research that people will find a way, whether that is to go to a friend’s house, whether that’s to go to a sports bar or restaurant to watch the game.

“We’re sensitive to it, but at the same time, the numbers bear out that people watch events as much on cable as anything else.”

The BCS championship is not the first major sporting event to migrate to cable, Magnus pointed out. Portions of the NCAA basketball tournament will be on cable this year and early rounds of the British Open, as well as the NBA conference finals, and the American and National League championship series for Major League Baseball all are televised on cable.

None of those, however, are events where champions are decided.

Last year, the BCS championship was broadcast on ABC (like ESPN, owned by Disney) and tagged as “ESPN on ABC,” but it was important to ESPN that it take ownership of the title game this year and cement its dominance in college sports programming.

“Nonetheless, we were sensitive to it,” Magnus said.

Just not sensitive enough to deliver the game over free public airwaves.

ESPN also added Alabama coach Nick Saban as an analyst for the 3-D telecast of the game, along with former Florida coach Urban Meyer. The decision to use Saban, in particular, incensed many Auburn fans who couldn’t stomach the thought of the coach of their most bitter rival analyzing their national championship game.

ESPN, as you might expect, was “sensitive” to that but decided to use Saban anyway. Ed Placey, the network’s senior coordinating producer for college football game coverage, said Saban’s expertise as the coach of the 2010 National Champion Crimson Tide trumped those concerns.

Many Auburn fans remained displeased.

“I haven’t personally heard any of those reactions, but I’m aware of them,” Placey said the day before the championship game. “We knew it was coming. Someone with Nick Saban’s credentials and certainly coming off a national championship and a person who, as most of Alabama knows and most of the country knows, is a straight shooter and someone that’s going to be candid and passionate and tell it like it is, those are the people that we want a part of our broadcast.”

There likely are many who follow LSU and the Miami Dolphins who might dispute the description of Saban as “a straight shooter and someone that’s going to be candid.”

Saban abruptly left LSU to become coach of the Dolphins in 2004, then bolted Miami for Alabama two years later, despite repeated denials. His exit from the Dolphins was met with so much outrage that eventually he was forced to issue a public apology for his “professional mishandling” of the situation.

No doubt Saban, too, was “sensitive to it.” Perhaps he and ESPN are a good fit, after all.