Hi Pat,
We were hoping to see some more feedback come in on this topic from other people before adding our own thoughts, but perhaps we can get this discussion moved along.
It's difficult to make comparisons to other websites because very few other sites provide the types of functionality that's being delivered by MBSportsWeb. So the influence of "other sites" on our planning exists, but is minimal.
We've been delivering a mobile-optimized version of the site for over 7 years now, which was well ahead of the mobile browsing trend. Nowadays, across the network of MBSportsWeb sites we see an average of 35% of all traffic via mobile devices. With well over 100K visitors per day, it's certainly a segment of the audience that we're paying close attention to.
The current mobile version of the site has many advantages - it's a much more lightweight version of the site so it won't consume anywhere close to the same amount of data plan than the full version. Even for those fortunate to have unlimited data plans, the fact that the physical footprint of the mobile site is smaller means that the site loads faster. While it's true that part of this smaller footprint is delivering less / different information than what's available on the full site, in most cases all the information is still available (just differently).
The internal mechanics of how the site is detecting mobile devices currently, and allowing the end-user to override that setting, is not trivial. While nothing's impossible, if an update to the site is somewhat difficult to accomplish we would expect that it's impact is significant. At this point, we don't have a majority of people who are asking for this option to be available. So, at this point, we are not planning to make this available.
That said, we are much more interested in finding out where & why the current mobile version of the site is falling short. The request to view the full site on a mobile device wouldn't be happening if the mobile site was satisfying all the needs / wants of the visitors. We think making improvements to the mobile site are likely to be easier to accomplish, and would be a much better long-term solution than delivering the full site to a screen too small to make it usable.
So please keep this discussion going by letting us know specifically where the mobile site is falling short, and we'd be happy to take a look at making those improvements.
Shaun