The Mountain West Sports Network which was the first conference specific network has announced that they are ceasing operations on May 31, according to Sports Business Daily. The official announcement was made today that the station's 44 employees would be let go, but have priority for other openings within the NBC Sports family.
This is a huge blow for the Mountain West since the Mtn. broadcast a lot of games and allowed every school to have at least 11 of their football games be on television, that is after including CBS Sports and NBC Sports. Now, there will be a lot of games that will not be shown. So schools like New Mexico, UNLV and Colorado State will see a drastic drop in games televised. Also, what is unknown is if those teams local affiliates can broadcast games in their market, because with the Mtn. that was not really allowed for football, but just basketball.
In the Sports Business Daily article it does mention some hope in that CBS Sports Network is working with the Mountain West to provide more nationally distributed games for football and basketball. Who knows what that really means exactly, but I can almost guarantee that there will be more games not show on television. The only way that something could be close is if over the air CBS picks up a game of the week for football, but that seems unlikely.
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