April 20 Notebook
April 20, 2006 12:17 AM | General
April 20, 2006
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The Mountain West Conference has served notice to television’s big boys: if you won’t show our games then we’ll just create our own television network.
On Tuesday in San Diego, the league announced it was partnering with CSTV (College Sports Television) to create MountainWest Sports Network, also to be known as The mtn. The concept is certainly innovative: the MWC will have 24-hour-a-day programming that the league is billing as a “super-regional network.” It is the first of its kind in college sports, modeling the 2-year-old NFL Network which is in about 40 million homes.
The potential Mountain West television inventory is substantial: 36 MWC football games, 150 basketball games and more than 200 men’s and women’s Olympic sports contests. Concepts ranging from original programming to media days and pep rallies have been discussed. All programming could also be made available via the Internet or through podcasts.
It’s been 1 ½ years since the Mountain West Conference chose to look beyond ESPN for other alternatives, eventually signing on with fledgling CSTV in 2004.
“Our board just said, ‘ESPN, we’re very thankful and appreciative, but we don’t’ want to play on Tuesday in football, and we don’t want to play at 10 o’clock on Monday nights,’” said MWC commissioner Craig Thompson. “We were tired of the times and the commitments that they were putting us into.”
CSTV president Chris Bevilacqua called it a “breakthrough in sports programming that will completely change the way fans stay connected with the teams, rivalries and pageantry of the Mountain West Conference.”
That remains to be seen.
CSTV, recently purchased by network powerhouse CBS, isn’t available on most cable systems and The mtn. presently doesn’t have any known agreements with cable or satellite providers.
This is what you would generously call a cart-before-the-horse proposition.
Although the MWC spans three time zones and seven states, the conference encompasses only 22 million homes. By comparison, the Big East Conference – a league Thompson has criticized in the past for keeping its BCS status in football -- covers nearly ¼ of all television households in the United States.
In an effort to gain access to more cable systems, CSTV is running a petition to get 250,000 signatures on its web site. Presently it has only about 103,000.
CSTV, which carries live West Virginia University sports programming on its Internet All Access service, is hoping its parent company CBS can persuade some of its local affiliates to climb aboard.
The Mountain West Conference is undeterred.
“It’s going to be great,” said BYU athletic director Tom Holmoe. “There will be some bumps in the road, sure, as we get started. It’s all new.”
Thompson is even more confident. “We are going to reach all four corners of the country, and we're going to be able to follow Mountain West sports like no one has ever followed Mountain West sports in the past,” he was quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune.
Money, of course, is a critical component to the deal. According to Provo Daily Herald, each school in the conference will earn about $1.1 million in television revenue per year from CSTV, or about $400,000 more than they got from ESPN in its last deal. ESPN presented the MWC with about 300 hours of live programming compared to the 1,300 CSTV is promising.
But prominent MWC markets like Salt Lake City and Las Vegas have no plans of offering The mtn. on its basic cable packages. Thompson believes those cable systems not interested will eventually jump on the bandwagon.
“You’ve got to take it sequentially,” he said. “We’re announcing it, announcing what’s going to be on it and showing some of the programming that will be on it. Hopefully that will spur local cable operators to say, ‘This looks like a must-carry station.’”
New San Diego State football coach Chuck Long has more immediate concerns.
“I have parents in Chicago,” Long was quoted in the San Diego Union-Tribune. “What’s the best way for them to get these games?”
That’s a good question.
Perhaps the Longs can find San Diego State games somewhere between Logo and Lifetime Movies on their Chicago cable system if the Mountain West and CSTV are lucky.
At least that’s where I recall watching CSTV’s coverage of Conference USA football last year on our Morgantown cable system.
But at least the Mountain West deserves credit for taking on the big boys. And you can bet the rest of the major conferences will keep a close eye on The mtn. to see if it works. If it does, our cable systems will soon be overcrowded with college conference networks.
If it doesn’t, the Mountain West heads back to the negotiating table with ESPN hoping for half of what it got last time, and plenty of 10 o’clock Tuesday night football games.
The mtn. debuts on Saturday, Sept. 2, when Utah State plays at Wyoming.
