The TV Deal

by Jeremy Mauss on Jun 21, 2007 7:58 AM PDT

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.

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At least you can watch the games that are broadcast. I am a DISH customer and can’t even watch those. I am sick of this. How in the world did the MWC think this TV deal was a good thing to do? I love my DISH and I hate cable, but I am very close to calling DISH NETWORK and having them come retrieve their DISH and DVR so that I can watch my Utah Football and Basketball games.

by MBart on Aug 27, 2007 2:12 PM PDT reply actions

I have dish network and only have versus and cstv thats it.

by gulfcoastpolo on Aug 27, 2007 2:28 PM PDT reply actions

My concern is the fact that I live east of Colorado, North Carolina to be specific. I have no chance to see any games now. With ESPN I had at least a shot to see them at a sports bar, and the first year I was out here, I did just that. Now I find myself scrambling to even hear a radio broadcast of the games. I can’t buy cable and pay for Yahoo broadcasts, and pay for CSTV XXL, and pay-per-view games played against teams in other conferences, etc etc etc (all options I’ve taken advantage of in the past, except cable). My buddy lives in Utah with Directv and he can’t even get the games without paying extra for CSTV and that still does not guarantee him any games. And how does the commissioner justify passing the buck to the fans? Is it not his job to ensure the same coverage as ESPN is provided to the fans. Is that not why they play football and other sports in the first place? If it wasn’t for us, they wouldn’t be playing. I’m very disappointed that the fan experience was not considered before this deal was finalized. Thanks for nothing, Craig Thompson!

by Nicholas on Sep 30, 2007 7:38 PM PDT reply actions