From a purely selfish standpoint, if you're a sports fan, then a la carte is a very bad deal for you without exception. I always shake my head when I see sports fans complaining about all of the channels that they don't watch. What they fail to realize is that ESPN and your applicable regional sports network alone cost more than the bottom 80 to 100 channels in your basic cable channel lineup *combined*. Those channels are the most expensive by FAR and, more importantly, ESPN isn't going to charge the $5 per month that it's doing in the cable context. It's going to need to charge at an a la carte rate that matches the revenue that it gets now, which would be astronomical. Think about what it cost just to watch one Mayweather fight for a couple of hours earlier this month and now extrapolate that into paying a la carte for an entity that has NFL Monday Night Football, NBA and MLB playoff games (not just the regular season), all of the major power college conferences and the College Football Playoff.
There is one group that will save money in a la carte: the group that watches (a) NO sports and (b) NO high cost scripted programs (e.g. Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Archer, The Americans). The channels that carry those types of programs draw the highest carriage fees by far, while the other 90% of the basic channels in your lineup cost mere pennies.
If you want to argue from an altruistic standpoint that the 80-year grandmothers shouldn't be paying $5 per month for ESPN when she never watches it, then that's perfectly fine. I more than sympathize with that viewpoint. However, if you're posting on this message board, I really hope that you're not naive enough to think that you'll actually end up being the beneficiaries of an a la carte environment. Sports fans will bear the cost, which might very well be fair overall, but it certainly won't save any of us here any money. The people that watch Lifetime, OWN, low cost reality shows and documentaries, and daytime talk shows all day are the ones subsidizing people that watch (a) sports and (b) high cost scripted shows. The problem that I see is that disproportionate number of the people that seem to argue in favor of a la carte and fool themselves into thinking that they'd be saving money are the people that watch (a) and (b) without any understanding of the cost structure (and to be clear, I'm very much in the (a) and (b) category). Once again, I have no issue with the concept of "paying for what you watch" in principle (although that brings up the issue that probably no channels other than the most popular established ones that were in the circa-1990 basic cable lineup could survive in an a la carte environment, which is another matter), but it irks me when the very people that think that it will save them money are exactly who are going to get slammed with the highest costs. We're not the ones getting screwed in the basic cable environment - it's actually everyone else that's subsidizing our sports viewing habits. Whenever you have a conversation about this a la carte topic, always remember that.