Not only has Mountain West moved its football and basketball games from ESPN to CSTV, they are creating a regional network.
The first regional sports network dedicated to a single conference has a name and a football schedule. It just doesn’t have agreements to be carried on cable in two of the Mountain West Conference’s biggest markets.
The MountainWest Sports Network will debut on Sept. 2 with four games, starting with Utah State at Wyoming.
Chris Bevilacqua, president of CSTV Regional Networks, said that while his company has a national agreement with Cox, it doesn’t yet have agreements with local providers in San Diego and Las Vegas.
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In August 2004, the nine-team Mountain West Conference, which spans three time zones, signed a seven-year, $82 million deal with CSTV that began last year.It will carry 36 football games, 150 basketball games and more than 200 games in minor sports, as well as other programming.
“You’ve got to take it sequentially,” Thompson said. “We’re announcing it, announcing what’s going to be on it and showing some of the programming that will to be on it. Hopefully that will spur local interest and local cable operators to say, ‘This looks like a must-carry station.'”
Thompson said it will aim to be fan-friendly. The majority of the network’s football games will be played on Saturday afternoons, rather than in the evening, and only one will be on a Thursday night.
When CSTV came looking for a conference partner, “Our board just said, ‘ESPN, we’re very thankful and appreciative, but we don’t want to play on Tuesday night in football, and we don’t want to play at 10 o’clock on Monday nights,”‘ Thompson said. “We were tired of the times and the commitments that they were putting us into.”
MWSN will get on in those markets. It is just starting negotiations, and there is plenty of time. More important is getting on DirecTV and Dish satellite services.
Here in Ohio, we’ve just watched the Cleveland Indians go from FoxSports Ohio to their own network by the start of the season. Plenty of down to the wire negotiations, and the kinks still being worked out of the system.
This is the way things are going (NBA TV, NFL Network, YES …). Maximizing the money by doing your own network. It makes even more sense for conferences. It’s even easier to fill the dead space (not football and men’s basketball games) with all the other sports, the multitude of coaches and team propaganda there is.
It may seem like the Mountain West is limiting itself with its dealings with CSTV, but that is short term.
As they said, this was driven by ESPN marginalizing them in football to Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesday nights. Killing their actual game attendance. As cable and satellite packages keep expanding, there’s no reason there won’t be tiers offering conference networks. Especially when some of the bigger conferences join in.
If I had to guess which BCS Conference will be first, I would say the SEC. They already have deals with CBS — who just happens to own CSTV. They have the fanbase that would support the network throughout the South.
