The staggering 15-year, $2.25 billion deal between the Southeastern Conference and ESPN comes with a bittersweet thought that appears in my head as a cheesy, outdated graphic.

First, for the fans watching at home, the deal will give them more access to the SEC starting next year. The number of men’s basketball games on TV will triple. The production value will likely be better than the SEC TV channel once envisioned by commissioner Mike Slive.

If Comcast agrees to add ESPNU — and a deal is close — at least seven million more homes will get the channel and an additional prime-time SEC game.

“We’re in active conversations with Comcast,” Burke Magnus, ESPN senior vice president for college sports programming, said Monday. “I can’t speak for them, but I believe they recognize the value in ESPNU, which is why conversations are happening. This will accelerate that process, we hope.”

But the deal also kills a relic, a Saturday afternoon tradition for Southern football fans: the SEC’s affiliation with Raycom Sports/Lincoln Financial/Jefferson-Pilot. We will always know it as the JP game.

Yes, the 12:30 JP game. I will weirdly miss the grainy footage, the three Daves, graphics the 1980s would reject and score updates that are always two quarters behind. The JP games are like your crazy uncle: exasperating but entertaining, strange but absolutely necessary. It’s family. You can’t imagine life any different.

That was our network. That was our Vanderbilt-Ole Miss game. I remember asking a bartender to put on the JP game before a wedding in Austin, Texas, and he looked at me like I had three heads. And, no, he couldn’t make fun of the video quality. Only we can do that. It’s like that scene in “Animal House” when Otter says, “He can’t do that to our pledges,” and Boon responds, “Yeah, only we can do that to our pledges.”

The JP game meant the start of the weekly SEC football slate, a necessity at every tailgate. What were you going to watch, the Big Ten game at noon between Michigan State and Northwestern? No. For the seventh straight week, you were going to watch a Kentucky game and like it.

Just mention Jefferson-Pilot to a Southern football fan and watch the story-swapping and laughter begin. For my friends in college, it was JP inexplicably making players glow in divine fashion during replays before commercial breaks. We never quite understood that.

A personal favorite — the Bluegrass Miracle helps LSU stun Kentucky, one of the most fantastic plays you’ll ever see, and JP puts up the following final score: Kentucky 30, LSU 27. I like to imagine the following scene in the ESPN Classic offices:

ESPN Classic producer: Intern, as an intern, you were supposed to get me the actual TV footage of the Kentucky-LSU game. This was shot by a fan in the stands with a camcorder.

Intern: That is the TV footage, sir.

ESPN Classic producer: Oh. Yikes. You’re right. And I see we’re going to have to edit this final score. Wow. Sorry, Rick.

Intern: My name is Brian.

ESPN Classic producer: Whatever.

Here’s the sad part: Raycom is actually going HD this season, starting with Saturday’s Florida-Hawaii game. I literally can’t wait to see Raycom’s version of HD. I think it’s going to be black-and-white but really, really clear.

All jokes aside, the three Daves will be missed. They are a good crew and even better people. A little hokey at times? Maybe. But I think some of the ESPN crews next year will make a lot of SEC fans miss them.

No doubt, ESPN will only improve the SEC’s exposure and enhance its image. The network boasts so many platforms and remains at the forefront of a rapidly changing world in media, an important asset in a 15-year deal.

Raycom could not match that. ESPN will be great for the conference, and institutions will certainly profit. But let’s not forget the little guy who, for the last 16 years, gave us SEC football in the early afternoon. And a lot of cherished chuckles.

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