Tailgate setup - Dish or DirecTV?

[one wolf]

Please forgive me if this has been discussed - I will continue searching for a similar thread. Also, I orignally posted this in the sports forum but was redirected to both the D* and E* forums for better advice, so apologies for the multiple threads in multiple forums.

My buddies and I have been tailgating at our alma mater football games for 22 years - it's as much fun for us now as it was back when we were in school and I hope we'll be doing it for at least 22 more years.

We're upgrading this year to HDTV and thus the old DTV box/dish we used to use with the 36" CRT won't work.

Here's the primary question: what's our best (cheapest) option for HDTV service given our needs:

• Only used 8 weekends in the fall every year
• College football - ACC in particular. We want to be able to catch every possible ACC game. SEC secondary.

That's really it. I realize that neither Dish or DTV offer any kind of plan that lets us pay for only the 8 saturdays we need it and that's fine... but what I don't want is a 2-year commitment or the such.

My gut feel is that we need to buy a HD dish and receiver off criagslist and then activate it through someone's existing account before the season, then turn it off after the season. This sound right?

If yes then the only other question is Dish or DTV. From what I can tell, ESPN's Gameplan Package is available on both. Aside from that are there other college football programming differences between dish and dtv? Specifically ACC?

Thanks very much in advance for any help.