The TV Deal

Everyone within the Mountain West Conference knows how terrible the TV deal is. I will go over the details here for a moment for those who live out of the confines of the conference. Well, The Mountain West Conference and (horrible) Commissioner Craig Thompson signed a deal with CSTV to break away from ESPN. On the surface the idea of having a specific channel for your confernce is a great idea, plus the conference was the first to do so, beating out the Big 10 and SEC who have recently followed suite in this.

The idea of the conference was to be able to show every football and men’s basketball game on the TV stations on the deal. The channels were to be CSTV, The Mtn., Versus with CSTV supposedly to be the main network. The deal was to be $80 million over 7 years, and this was more then what ESPN was offering and the benefits were to be majority of Saturday afternoon football games with VERY minimal Thursday night games which happened to have 6 for the whole conference instead of one a week on ESPN.

The problem with the network came when The Mtn. was formed this was to be a secondary channel specifically for the conference. This channel was to also air football and basketball, along with soccer, baseball, softball, and other minor sports. Comcast decided to get a 50% stake in the channel and put it exclussively on Comcast, which meant you were screwed if you had Dish Network or DirecTv, I have the Dish. This news came only a few weeks from the start of the 2007 season and still to this date has not been resolved. I myself would have choosen Comcast until they wanted to charge me over $60 to install at my apartment building that was PRE WIRED so I declinded.

At least with Versus and CSTV I recieved both channels or people with a dish could get, but I soon realized that did not really help much, because there were only a handful of games on the channels I could recieve. The commissioners comments were to call and educate the people at both dish providers and ask them…. errr beg them to add the channel. This situation may not even be fixed for this season partly because the commish (if you want to call him that) said negotiations will not begin until August. AUGUST!!! The season starts late August.

One thing that really bothers me about this is that CSTV shelled out all of this money and is showing minimal games in any of the conference sports. I mean no respect to Conference USA, but the Mountain West is typically stronger overall as a football conference and there may have been more of that conference games then the Mountain West conference that has the exclusive deal. Also, I do lose some disrespect when programming on CSTV is division I-AA Ivy league football where the cameramen have to zoom in as tight as possible to try to hide the crowd of about 400 people. You have to be kidding me showing Ivy league football insted of Mountain West football!!

The deal is terrible and hopefully something can get done, because this will affect reruiting and affect pollsters as well, because if no one sees the game how good could the team be? Especaily if any teams want to bust into the BCS.