BT buys ESPN's channels in the UK - what does this mean for watching college football here?

Today BT announced that they have acquired ESPN's UK and Ireland television channels (see announcement here and a BBC news story here). This deal includes the rights to many sports but the relevant information for this blog is that it includes both the ESPN America channel and the College Football rights. However, one thing the announcement does not specify is how both of these will be used, There is no mention of a specialist American sports channel (i.e. a version of ESPN America) continuing. What the announcement does say is:

"the deal will allow BT to continue to show a host of US sports currently shown on ESPN

America, including NCAA College Basketball, NCAA College Football and NASCAR". 

This does not state if ESPN America or some new version of it will continue. The worry for those of us who are fans of these sports is that BT will just add this content to their other sports channels and so they will effectively become schedule fillers around the sports which are bigger over here. This means the Saturday evenings spent watching 2 or 3 games back-to-back will be over.

Unfortunately for me, College Football is nowhere near popular enough to compete for space in the schedule with the Premier League, Rugby or most of the other sports that BT has been acquiring the rights for over the last year or so. 

A positive way to look at this though is that without this deal College Football may have disappeared from UK TV completely. ESPN has lost far too many sports rights to BT over the last year and so it's main sports channel was clearly going to lose money. ESPN wanted to exit the UK market so the fact that BT has bought all the rights ESPN America had means we should at least see some. But the question is how much?