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Mountain West Media Rights Deal Spilt Between Fox Sports, CBS Sports
A new home for Mountain West football and basketball.
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Fox Sports will host MW games
The Mountain West new television deal is coming into focus with Fox Sports replacing ESPN but CBS Sports is remaining on board, according to Sports Business Journal. This new deal will begin on July 1, 2020.
This is a big change as Mountain West football and basketball games will be moved off of ESPN. Games remain on CBS Sports Network but the Fox Sports deal would primarily place games on FS1 and be a new change for the league. The report does not rule out games on over-the-air Fox, or on the other end of the spectrum, the less distributed FS2 might be the home of some Mountain West games.
That could mean a Fox property could be the home for the Mountain West title game in football and maybe even basketball. The prior few basketball title games have been on CBS and the football title game split time on CBS and more recently ESPN.
Sports Business Journal is also reporting the deal to be valued at a combined $35 million annually for Fox and CBS Sports — around $20 million from CBS and $15 million from Fox. The length of the deal is not yet known, but Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson has said to have wanted a shorter deal compared to the 10-year deal the conference had.
A few notes about this deal. It would be for all schools with the exception of Boise State and Hawaii. The Warriors have its own television deal with Spectrum for its own football games with at least six and sometimes seven games.
The Broncos get to negotiate its own exclusive deal for home games. When Boise State spurned the Big East to remain in the Mountain West that was one of the perks.
The Broncos teamed up with ESPN and paid them an additional $1.8 million for the contract which ends after this season. There is no word on what network will host Boise State’s home football games at this time.
It could be possible that if Boise State remains with ESPN that the league will be on three different sports networks. That fragments the package a bit, however good news is that the league is not going the route of putting games behind the ESPN+ paywall for conference controlled games.
That deal will increase the Mountain West pay from $1.1 million per school to approximately $3.18 million per school per year. That nearly 300 percent increase is nice but it is now more than half of what the American gets. The AAC deal is worth just under $7 million per member for its 12-year deal.
Also, the deal means that kick times will be late at night as they have been since networks want that West Coast prime time window. Had the league gone with a streaming service for games, then kick times could have been controlled more by the schools.
Fox Sports is now a television partner with the Mountain West, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-12 and Big East. They also are looking to snag the SEC game of the week that was previously on CBS.
Being in business with so many leagues and only having two primary networks in Fox and FS1 — three if we are to include FS2 — could make for some interesting kick times. The Pac-12 is already considering 12 p.m. ET kicks for its games out West, so who knows if the Mountain West will have similar kicks to be able to fill out Fox’s football slate.
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