Note on Syracuse's game times vs. NU and Maine

Earlier you may have noticed that I posted the kickoff times for the Syracuse home games against Northwestern and Maine and that both would be televised on Time Warner Cable. Per a request from the school, I have removed those listings and those games once again appear in the Non-Televised List portion of the week three & four schedules.

I am complying with the request because the school has not officially announced the kickoff time & broadcaster for those games. I've let them know that my source for the listing of these games was the Time Warner Sports websites serving the Rochester and Central NY areas so that they realize that the information that I posted was on a publicly available website and not inside information. The Rochester site appears to have been asked to change the listings to TBD and has done so.

If/when these games are available for television, they will be reflected on the site.

Thanks.

Conference TV Contract: The MWC

The Mountain West has fought for BCS AQ access, paved the way for conference television networks and managed to get a couple wins in BCS bowls. They managed to leave ESPN of their own accord and live to tell about it. And they have the highest paying contract of all non-AQ conferences.

http://mattsarzsports.com/2009/MWC.aspx

The MWC and CSTV announced a partnership in late 2004 that was slated to start in 2006 and run for seven year. The MWC spurned ESPN's reported offer to stay on the network because ESPN intended to offer the MWC slots for football on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. The contract with CSTV covered all MWC sports and would also move the MWC off of Monday nights where they were part of the Big Monday basketball series. The schools were supposedly unhappy about the 10pm MT start times that those telecasts carried and wanted to get away from the 6-12 day windows where kickoff times were set by ESPN.

Two components were key to the agreement:

• CSTV, which had limited distribution, had to distribute eight football games to a national over-the-air network or national cable network. Supposedly the magic number for a network to be considered national was 70 million homes.
• CSTV would create a regional sports network for the conference, absorbing SportsWest Productions, which was a syndicator of WAC and MWC football broadcasts.
  

Both components have been accomplished, but not without some stumbles. CSTV announced the creation of the mtn. at the 2006 Media Day and a day later Comcast was announced as a partner in the mtn. and would be the recipient of the eight games that would have to be distributed on a national network. Those games were given to Comcast's OLN channel, which changed its name over to Versus a few months later. The mtn. struggled to get distribution on satellite and cable systems from the beginning, but deals have since been struck with DirecTV and other cable distributors throughout the MWC footprint. Dish Network remains on the outside, as does the Time Warner system that covers the San Diego area.

The MWC, by requesting its kickoff times be set before the season starts, has no in-season selection order for games. Versus takes on eight games, CBS College Sports (formerly CSTV) usually takes nine games (they have rights to 24 and the count is the sum of the Versus and CBS C games) and the mtn. takes the rest of the games. It appears that the conference has some sort of clause in their contract that makes sure each team appears at least once for a national telecast. The only downside to this is that the national telecasts can often match teams towards the middle or the bottom of the conference, while a key game could end up on a mtn. regional telecast.

One of the quirks of the television portion of the contract revolves around the BYU-Utah game. The game is often the highest profile game that the conference offers and it has been televised on multiple networks two of the past three years, though in 2008 it stayed exclusively with the mtn.

The one component that seems to be missing from the original CSTV-MWC agreement is the web streaming component. Outside of the games on CBS College Sports, games are not webstreamed. Only time will tell if that ever happens.

The MWC has the revenue and on-field comparisons that rival some AQ conferences. Computer rankings show a divide that exists between them and the other four non-AQ conferences. As their exposure rises through increased availability of their TV partners and their on-field performance as a conference continues to improve, the BCS may have a hard time ignoring them.

EDIT: The MWC has a 10 year deal with CBS College Sports. It is a 10 year, $120 million contract.

Conference TV Contract: The MAC

The Mid-American Conference has sat in the shadow of the Big Ten for much of its existence and after achieving a fair amount of success at the beginning of the 2000s, has fallen back in terms of national recognition. Ball St.'s 2008 regular season undefeated run was discounted by a less than stellar set of OOC opponents. The conference has went 2-10 over the last four bowl seasons. But it has upgraded its television contract slightly.

http://mattsarzsports.com/2009/MAC.aspx

In late January (one day before the commissioner who negotiated the contract stepped down), the MAC negotiated a new eight year contract starting with the 2009 season. The prior contract was a combined contract, like this one, for all MAC sports and generally 7-10 MAC games would air on ESPN/ESPN2 with additional games on ESPNU. The new contract calls for a minimum of eleven MAC games to air on ESPN Networks (six on ESPN/ESPN2, five on ESPNU) with additional games available to be selected by ESPN360. The conference championship game is also available for telecast on ESPN/ESPN2

The MAC has had vast majority of its ESPN/ESPN2 coverage on weeknights, along with some of its ESPNU coverage. A new quirk introduced into the scheduling of MAC games on ESPN is for two games to be scheduled on a weeknight, with the best game provided to the network that has the better coverage, ie (ESPN2 vs. ESPNU or ESPNU vs. ESPN360).

Starting with the 2007 season, the MAC began a package of regional telecasts in conjunction with ESPN Regional Television and that package will continue with the new contract. The package was developed to provide content to many of the local stations in the Big Ten/MAC footprint who lost games when the Big Ten created the Big Ten Network to replace ESPN Regional games.

The MAC has also placed several games for regional telecast on Fox Sports Ohio and Fox Sports Detroit. All other telecast rights revert back to the individual schools to use for local rights packages.

With the exception of the days where ESPN can choose between two weeknight games and place them on multiple ESPN outlets, no weekly selection order exists for the MAC, though ESPN can pick up additional games throughout the year. ESPN generally announces their national telecasts once the MAC releases its schedule for the year. The ESPN Regional games are announced close to mid-June and other telecasts trickle out throughout the summer.

The MAC has also partnered with JumpTV for its web presence and has an online streaming package called All-MACcess where all non-ESPN owned games are streamed live.

For the foreseeable future, the MAC is secure with national telecasts (albeit a rights fee that is rumored to be less than their WAC counterparts and comparable to what C-USA receives from ESPN) and a very solid syndicated package of games reaching the target MAC markets. The conference needs to continue working as individual schools at increasing their local and regional packages. Schools like Buffalo (Time Warner), Bowling Green and Toledo (Buckeye Cable) and Northern Illinois (CSN Chicago) have very strong regional packages, while the Michigan based schools and Ball St. which used to have games on the the Comcast Local regional channel have yet to replace those lost telecasts.

Las Vegas Bowl Renews PAC-10 & MWC agreements

The MWC and PAC-10 will remain as part of the Las Vegas Bowl until the year 2013 under new agreements made between the conferences and the bowl committee. The MWC will continue to provide its top choice for the game while the PAC-10 will provide its No. 5. The bowl is owned and operated by ESPN Regional Television.

This is the 1st MWC bowl agreement under the current shuffle of bowl games that is going on this offseason. This is also the PAC-10's first announced agreement, but agreements are rumored to be announced for both the Sun and Alamo bowl games. If everything holds, the PAC-10 lineup could look like this:

1. Rose
2. Holiday
3. Alamo
4. Sun
5. Las Vegas
6. Emerald

The Pointsettia could end up being the 7th bowl.

USC - Ohio St. to be produced in 3D

ESPN announced today that the USC at Ohio St. game will be produced in 3D. Separate production trucks and announcers will be used for the ESPN 3D and the ESPN HD telecasts. ESPN has been testing 3D for at least two years according to the press release.

The broadcast will not be available to the home viewer. The Galen Center in LA will screen the telecast along with theaters in Columbus, Hartford and Hurst, TX (near Dallas). To gain admittance one must get tickets from local radio stations in those markets.

Addendum to the C-USA discussion

I wanted to share a comment and interesting discussion point that was brought up regarding the C-USA analysis by a poster on MWCboard

One significant omission from your CUSA discussion.

Did you ever wonder why ESPN surrendered exclusivity at the very time that CUSA was weakened by the Big East raid? I could see surrendering something as a concession to strength but as a concession to weakness? Intuitively at least, that makes no sense. So here's the deal...

ESPN basically messed up and, in the CUSA contract, failed to protect
their right to cancel or renegotiate the contract if the membership changed --
which obviously it did when the Big East raided them. If they hadn't left that
out of the contract, then CSTV never would have entered the picture. The ability
that CUSA had to work with both networks wasn't a superior television
attractiveness to the other non-AQ conferences, but an inadvertently strong
negotiating position. ESPN wanted to limit their expenditures for CUSA so they
reached an agreement with CUSA requiring them to broadcast the same number of
games, all on ESPN/ESPN2, but for far less money. And in exchange for that, they
let CUSA work with CSTV to broadcast more games -- enough more games that CUSA was made whole financially.

So it was a win-win-win situation for all parties. ESPN cut their payments to CUSA -- but had to give up exclusivity to do so. In gaining CUSA, CSTV got more product -- which they desperately needed in their infancy. And CUSA got more exposure for roughly the same money and stayed in the good graces of ESPN doing it.

Which brings us to today. My expectation is that ESPN will now require exclusivity and CUSA will have to make a choice between ESPN and CBSC. CBSC will probably still pay more than ESPN will, and will probably give them better broadcast times, so I'm guessing CUSA will go with CBSC. With Memphis basketball suddenly in trouble (I'm referring mostly to the loss of the HC) and the economy shot, I can't imagine that they deserve more than the WAC gets -- but they will probably get a little more anyway.

But the per school / per year income from a CBSC contract should plummet -- perhaps by more than 50% from what they get currently from ESPN/CBSC. How much will probably depend upon how many football games a year they want.

And my response:

It's a fair question Yoda. ESPN did have the DOJ sniffing around many of their
contracts because of their practice of warehousing games from many conferences
(airing 1-2 games and holding the rest from being sold to another network). Karl
Benson (WAC), Rick Chryst (MAC) and others were interviewed by the DOJ (don't
know if C-USA's commissioner was). ESPN made the announcement for ESPNU in
September of 2004 and one would assume that ESPN made it known to C-USA that
they would have a place here if they so desired. I think I remember reading in
Sports Business Journal that ESPN, like they did with the WAC, said that they'd
put games on ESPNU as long as ESPN didn't have to pay anything extra.

I think ESPN may have been dealing with an outside force watching over them (DOJ) and I think its possible that the external force's presence is what led ESPN to
give up exclusivity.

Now I said its feasible. Whether it actually happened like that is another story.

As a postscript, it is a great question. Why did ESPN give up exclusivity to C-USA? Was it a mistake or loophole that C-USA took advantage of? Was the Department of Justice sniffing into ESPN's business deals with college conferences and was this a concession ESPN had to make? Was CSTV making noise that they would expose something in the negotiations to prove that ESPN was going to hold C-USA's inventory hostage?

Fact is that we're 2/3rd of the way through the contract, ESPNU is now entering its fifth season of televising games and CSTV became CBS College Sports and in my opinion, looks far less amateurish in its production values than it did four years ago. But its a great discussion.

Conference TV Contracts: Independents

The three FBS independents have individual TV contracts, with the two service academies with CBS College Sports and Notre Dame with NBC.

http://mattsarzsports.com/2009/IND.aspx

Since 1991, NBC has been the exclusive provider of Notre Dame home games, with the current contract ending after the 2015 season. Starting with the 2009 season, Notre Dame plans to schedule opponents on a 7-4-1 basis, seven home games in South Bend, four true road games and one neutral site "home" game. The neutral site "home" game will often be used as a primetime telecast by NBC due to the school's reluctance to schedule night games on campus. Notre Dame's on campus home games will typically kick off at 3:30pm ET and 2:30pm ET after Daylight Savings Time ends.

Navy began a long-term partnership for telecast of on-campus and select neutral sites starting in 2005 and those rights have been extended to end after the 2017 season. Included in a separate contract is the rights to Navy's "home" game with Notre Dame through 2016 with an option for the 2018 game. Included in the deal with CBS College Sports is free web streaming of every home game, operational rights to NavySports.com, HD telecasts for all home games and finalization of all kickoff times by May 1st of the upcoming season.

Army's existing rights are owned by ESPN, but have been sold to CBS College Sports (except for the Friday night home game vs. Rutgers) for the 2009 season and remain with CBS C starting with the 2010 season. Unlike the existing ESPN deal, all Army home games will be played on Saturdays with kickoff times of 12pm or 3:30pm to be decided by May 1st, like the Navy contract. A free web stream of all Army home games will also be provided for. Because the agreement for 2009 was finalized after CBS C had set its C-USA, MWC and Navy schedules, two of the Army home games will be televised via tape delay. Army's recent slate of Yankee Stadium home games (Rutgers-2011, Boston College-2012 and Air Force-2014) will also be televised here. Note that the game vs. Notre Dame at Yankee Stadium is a Notre Dame "home" game and will be televised by NBC.