Appearance Count Notes, C-USA Rights Update, Plus a New Bowl Game Outlet

* Regarding appearance counts for the final few weeks of the 2015 college football season:

• FOX will meet all of its requirements for the broadcast network portion of its Pac-12 agreement with their scheduled Black Friday game.  They will televise four Pac-12 games in east coast primetime of the seven games they've selected already.
• One of Utah's final two games must air on Pac-12 Networks.  Decent chance it is the Colorado game, but we'll see.  Could be the UCLA game depending on selection order.  Since the Utes are still in the driver's seat in the Pac-12 South, networks may look to see if the Colorado game will matter going into the final week of the season.
• LSU at Alabama has a lot of implications towards the remaining selections CBS can make.  If LSU wins, you might see their final three games on CBS...if they beat Ole Miss on 11/21.  An Alabama win could provide CBS a conundrum.  Do you take Alabama at Mississippi St., knowing that you could be locked out of the Iron Bowl, where Alabama could still be playing for the SEC West title if Alabama beats LSU and LSU beats Ole Miss.  Or is Egg Bowl more of a priority?  Fascinating stuff.
• Chris Fowler did tweet that he'll be calling Baylor at Oklahoma on 11/14, which would seem to place the Sooners on ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 or ESPNU five times.  This would mean that either the TCU or Oklahoma St. game would be on a FOX platform, provided that ESPN still has a six appearance maximum for Big 12 schools.
• 21 American games have appeared on ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 or ESPNU, with the potential for at least one more once 11/14 games have been finalized.  Should be relatively easy to get to 28 over the final few weeks when considering they should have two games on those networks on Black Friday.
• The MAC will have a game on ASN on Black Friday in addition to a CBS Sports Network window at 12pm ET.

* A new men's basketball event to be held in the Cayman Islands will start in November 2017.  No rightsholder was announced nor was a date specified for the event.

* Conference USA is still in process of negotiating with rightholders for their next agreement, which would start in about eight months.  FOX and CBS are still in active discussions.   A while back, I tried handicapping the potential future rightsholders.  New C-USA commissioner Judy MacLeod wants to raise the profile of the conference in men's basketball and to get the conference to have multiple schools in the NCAA tournament.  To do that, she may need to convince FOX and/or CBS to take on more games on their national platforms.  That might be tougher to do for CBS since they've added MAC and MVC games to their network.  FOX, on the other hand, could offer FS2 as a place for games in addition to FS1 and FSN if she desires more national telecasts.

I suppose we can't discount Sinclair's American Sports Network either, especially due to the next item.

* The Arizona Bowl seems to be a bit of a test lab.  The game initially announced that Campus Insiders would provide a national digital platform for the game and this week Sinclair's American Sports Network was announced as the television rightsholder.  Of note is that both entities are rightsholders of the two primary tie-in conferences (C-USA: ASN, MW: Campus Insiders).

This will be the first bowl game shown through a syndication outlet in nearly two decades⁺.  Through the early 90s, syndicators like Mizlou, Katz, Metrosports, Raycom and others often carried secondary bowl games with ESPN, in some cases, providing supplemental coverage or outright simulcasting the syndicator's coverage.

The last syndicated bowl game, from what I've been able to find over at 506Sports.com, is the 1994 Freedom Bowl which was syndicated by Raycom Sports.

⁺If you consider FSN a syndication outlet, and it has become one of sorts, you might consider the first two Silicon Valley Football Classics as the last syndicated bowl games.  That's your opinion, though FSN was more of a national platform back then.