You also have to consider that most college games do not have a fiber backhaul back to the integration studio, but rather a satellite uplink as the primary. Depending on the quality of the uplink truck, signal processing, dish, weather conditions, operator, etc these could also affect the PQ of a game in one way or the other, whereas fiber is a bit more transparent (and uncompressed). Most major events (most of the NFL remotes) have a fiber optic primary (or several fiber feeds) back to the studio. Monday Night Football has like 8 feeds (of which most are HD) generally allowing quadruple HD redundancy as the pregame truck can always take the game truck to air in the case of a failure. NESN uses a 100mbps fiber backhaul from the Garden & Fenway for their home games. Smaller college remotes are not gonna have anything near this and often are one-day gigs.
And then again consider you are watching on D* and/or E* where (if you read enough of these threads) you will start to see trends that the ESPN PQ is for whatever reason generally problematic coming from satellite providers. Most of those who routinely complain about the ESPN feeds are those watching on DSS. Could be MPEG2, could be some bit rate shaping going on, some encoding/decoding mishap, who knows.
