Television negotiations are underway for the merged Mountain West and Conference USA, and according to outgoing New Mexico president David Schmidly made some interesting comments about the merger. First off he said that league will likely be in an East/West division split and the odds of traveling all the way to play East Carolina or any Eastern teams is not likely or at the worst be very infrequent.
On that I believe there will be one or two games with the opposite divisions, so if there is a game to the Eastern teams it at most would be once a year.
Schmidly also talked about the television negotiations and said that the deal could be finalized by May. That seems extremely early since the league is forming in 2013 and the possibility of adding more teams. Primary negotiations are already involved with NBC/Comcast, CBS and Fox; while ESPN may be sent a proposal.
I wonder if there is still bad blood between the soon-to-be former Mountain West schools with ESPN, because with so many teams in the league it would be best to negotiate with multiple partners. With Eight conference football games a week and anywhere from eight to 16 home games per week during the non-conference season it would be a good idea to try to have more than one television partner so that all games could be broadcast.
With CBS there is two networks to work with in CBS and CBS Sports Network, NBC has NBC Sports Network and NBC and Fox has FX, the Fox Sports platform and Fox. ESPN has three networks plus online with ESPN3. If a deal is struck with just one of the four networks and assuming there is no regional channel like The Mtn. (which I think should still be used) then Fox makes the most sense because with their regional networks it allows many games to be shown. Those Fox Sports games might be regional but they would be able to be seen.
Without this post getting out of hand and changing directions, I think a good series of in-depth posts would be to see what network would be the best for broadcasting games. The details will probably range from date, time and amount of games.
Follow Mountain West Connection for more news around the clock via twitter, facebook and now google plus.