I’m like most of the rest of you. I watch Kansas University’s multi-talented men’s basketball team on television.

This, of course, has been an adjustment after covering the Jayhawks in person for nearly four decades. Sure, I miss the fieldhouse buzz and all that, but that’s not really the biggest change.

Instead of just showing up at the fieldhouse, now I have to figure out where in the heck I can find the latest game among the hundreds of digital cable television channels.

It’s sure a far cry from the old days, when one network owned the sole rights to all college basketball games and, if you were lucky, that network might bless us with a doubleheader on a Saturday afternoon.

Do you know how many men’s college basketball games will be televised live this Saturday?

I posed that question to a couple of sports-department staffers the other day and received varied answers. No one guessed higher than 18. Not even close.

From 11 a.m. until past well midnight Saturday, a myriad of networks will show an eye-straining 28 men’s college basketball games. Among those 28 are all six Big 12 Conference contests, including the Kansas-Missouri collision in Columbia, Mo. – the first major meeting between the ancient border rivals since the über-hyped football Armageddon at Arrowhead Stadium.

Big 12 pundits are already touting Saturday’s KU-MU game as one of only a handful the Jayhawks are in danger of losing. And with reason. The Tigers are talented, and they play like barracudas in Mizzou Arena.

With all the hoopla and with all the anticipation, surely this would be a game picked up by either ABC or CBS or, at the very least, ESPN or ESPN2.

But no. This installment of the Border War will be on ESPNU, the runt network of the self-proclaimed world-wide leader that usually gifts us with the likes of Muskingum, Heidelberg, Pace, Wagner, Stony Brook and Binghamton, among other obscurities.

Saturday, for example, Kansas-Missouri will anchor an ESPNU quadrupleheader that also includes Hampton-South Carolina State, Rutgers-DePaul and Eastern Illinois-Tennessee State. OK, Rutgers and DePaul are majors, too, but they’re hardly in the same rivalry mode as Kansas and Missouri.

While KU-MU is languishing in the horse latitudes of ESPNU, the flagship network of the world-wide leader will be carrying a Big 12 game between Texas A&M and Kansas State. Yep, those two long-time antagonists – the Aggies and the one-time Aggies. ESPN will also be providing us with Kentucky-Florida and Clemson-Duke.

Well, I guess Kansas can’t be on ESPN every week. KU has a dozen dates on ESPN, with five games down and seven still to go – we can only hope without Holly Rowe – including the Kansas-Missouri rematch on Feb. 4 in Allen Fieldhouse.

This season’s KU men’s basketball schedule has 12 games on ESPN and one each on ESPN2 and ESPNU. That doesn’t include three games on ESPN-Plus, which is essentially the Big 12 Network. What, no ESPN Classic?

By my count, eight different networks will carry at least one KU game this season. The Jayhawks are always bouncing off a communications satellite somewhere. All you have to do is find them.