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.