College Sports TV Signs Deal with Mountain West Conference, Breaking Into ESPN Turf
By Welch Suggs, Chronicle of Higher Education

The Mountain West Conference announced on Thursday that it would switch its television programming from ESPN to College Sports TV, a new network based in New York, beginning in 2006. The deal is CSTV's first successful foray into broadcasting the revenue-generating sports of football and men's basketball. The new deal will be worth $82-million to the league over seven years.

The Mountain West had been struggling to negotiate a new deal with ESPN, with which it signed a six-year, $48-million contract in 1999. Craig Thompson, the league's commissioner, said the key issues were ESPN's desire to schedule football games on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings and men's basketball games on Mondays at 10 p.m.

The CSTV deal "allows our member institutions to control our own assets," Mr. Thompson said at a news conference. "We can play at times our fans want to see us, and it's not dictated solely by the television entity."

The deal may also have implications for a reported federal inquiry into ESPN's near-monopoly on college football and basketball telecasts. All sides have refused to comment, but the U.S. Department of Justice reportedly has been investigating ESPN for possible violations of antitrust law.

The network, owned by the Walt Disney Company and a partner to ABC Sports, holds rights to the vast majority of college football and basketball games, and has been accused of refusing to let colleges make deals to televise games that ESPN does not plan to air.

With CSTV's emergence as an upstart rival, however, ESPN can assert that it is not a monopoly.

CSTV is carried by only a handful of cable providers, including Adelphia, Comcast, Insight, and Time Warner, as well as the DirecTV satellite service. On Thursday, officials from both the network and the conference promised that Mountain West games would be available to local, regional, and national audiences.

"What we're trying to emphasize here is that we get a mini-[version of the] NBC coverage of the Olympics," Mr. Thompson said. "We're excited because we have 19 championship sports, with a lot of events, and ... CSTV will televise or video-stream all of them."

The deal includes rights not only to television coverage, but also to a variety of newer technologies, such as video on demand, streaming events over the Internet, and conference and institutional athletics Web sites.

Although an improvement on Mountain West's current deal, the new contract will keep the conference's revenues below those of the six top leagues in college sports -- the Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pacific-10, and Southeastern Conferences -- which receive $40-million or more annually from their television contracts. Conference USA, another league just outside the top tier, received $7.5-million in broadcast fees in 2001-2, according to information filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

The Mountain West Conference consists of eight universities: the United States Air Force Academy; Brigham Young, Colorado State, and San Diego State Universities; and the Universities of Nevada at Las Vegas, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Texas Christian University will join the conference in 2005.