The point here is not that I'm stupid, I'll give you that, the point is that the ESPN strategy is in full play and working.
ESPN has a rough road ahead. Disney with the introduction of Disney+ and acquisition of Hulu has forced ESPN to spend money on ESPN+ without premium content as part of their goal to challenge Netflix with the Disney+/ Hulu / ESPN+ bundle.
ESPN / ESPN2 have 80+ million cable subscribers at $9/month ($8.64B/yr) and losing 3+ million subscribers per yr to cord cutting. ESPN+ has only 2+ million subscribers at $5/mo ($0.12B/yr) and higher churn since it is a month to month service.
If they put their premium content from ESPN / ESPN2 on ESPN+ they would need to raise the price to $25-30/month to recoup the loss of cable subscribers as every cable operator would drop them off the base tier in order to lower their cost / prices. Right now their current contracts prevent them from moving the premium content over to a direct to consumer offering. Evidently the BigXII must have offered some better content in order to get more money from ESPN when they announced the start of the BigXII streaming channel.
Only the true die-hard sports fans will pick it up for that price and most would only keep if for the minimum time necessary to watch the teams / leagues that we are interested in.
They are up to renew their MNF / highlight video package with the NFL within the next yr+. They currently pay $1.9B/yr for those rights. Don't see how they can even extend at current cost let alone pay more like the NFL is going to want / demand. This will be the 1st domino to fall in the next round of sports broadcast rights fees for all the different leagues. Sports leagues have gotten bloated on excessive TV contracts on the average cable subscriber when most don't even watch. The only hope for the sports leagues is that internet companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc... step up to the plate and keep the gravy train going...