Throughout the collegiate sports season, the Big Ten Network features a concept called Student U. This supplements the network’s normal coverage of conference athletics with broadcasts produced by university students. Since many of the schools have outstanding communications programs, this gives viewers extra coverage at a fraction of the cost.

For wrestling, this allows the network’s web site to stream more matches, many of which end up on TV in a delayed broadcast. This has really helped the network expand coverage of the niche sport, which is nice since the conference is the best in the nation. Aficionados of the sport like me don’t mind when we see it, as long as we can see it.

Unfortunately, when the conference tournament rolled around this weekend, the Big Ten Network went back to the old-school mindset of putting all its eggs in basketball’s basket. Only the conference finals will be broadcast by BTN, either over the air or online.

I know hoops has a bigger fan base, but to ignore the importance of the rest of the wrestling tournament is absurd. The Saturday evening semifinals are some of the best wrestling of the year. I’ve seen it live in the past and wish I could see it on TV this year.

Why can’t BTN stream the semis live and run them on TV later? They have a four-hour block running the same 30-minute show of basketball highlights Sunday morning. You can’t tell me that the students at the Medill School at Northwestern – the host site – can’t film and cut a two-hour program overnight. That can’t make that much more in advertising if it was cut in half to show two hours of wrestling. How can the network do such a great job covering one of the conference’s most powerful sports all year, then wash their hands of it for the sake of convenience just when it starts to get good?

So nutjobs like me will have to pour over Twitter feeds to get results and try to pretend we can imagine what the matches look like. But at least the hoops fans can see the same highlights four four hours Sunday morning.