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mtnradioMaybe you guys have already seen this, but I found the article posted on CougarBlue ... very interesting!!
Holmoe: TV deal pushed BYU out of MWC
By Scott D. Pierce
The Salt Lake Tribune
November 21, 2010
To say that BYUâs split from the Mountain West Conference has been a long time coming would be an understatement. To say that it was driven by television would be a simple statement of fact.
The man who helped negotiate the MWCâs TV contract, Real Salt Lake owner David Checketts, said the current owners of The Mtn., Comcast and CBS, âdidnât live up to any of the promises they made to BYU. ... In my view, they couldnât have messed this up any worse.â
If youâre looking for when things went wrong, look no further than the second week of September 2006. BYU Broadcasting was planning to replay the football teamâs 49-24 win over Tulsa when word came that Comcast â the operating partner of The Mtn. â was threatening legal action if that happened.
âBasically, we had the understanding that weâd be having what we have (beginning in 2011) with ESPN,â said BYU athletic director Tom Holmoe. Games not telecast by The Mtn. would be available for BYUTV. And BYU would be able to rebroadcast games.
Checketts said Comcast did, indeed, promise BYU those rights.
âI was in the room when they told them this, but they didnât want to put it in writing,â he said.
âAnd that is not how it turned out,â Holmoe said.
The MWCâs TV contract turned out to be something quite different from what was announced on Aug. 26, 2004. Checketts had been asked by the presidents of BYU and Utah to try to find an alternative to the deal ESPN was offering â less money, Tuesday- and Wednesday-night football games, and no Saturday games on TV.
The result was a six-year, $82 million contract with CSTV. Checketts folded his SportsWest Communications into CSTV, and the plan was to have a national presence on that network, along with launching the regional network that became The Mtn.
âIt seemed like a good idea at the time,â Checketts said. âIt was in the execution where CSTV really fell down.â
âThat period of time was so turbulent, so quick,â Holmoe said. âAnd the next thing you know, we went from having this national stage to a regional sports network.â
A small regional network at that. When it launched in 2006, The Mtn. was available in fewer than a million homes. More importantly, its ownership had changed.
In 2005, founder Brian Bedol agreed to sell CSTV to CBS. Checketts was gone; Bedol had to answer to CBS.
In 2006, Comcast came in as a 50 percent owner and operating partner of The Mtn. And, in 2008, CSTV â renamed CBS College Sports â was folded into CBS Sports.
âThey sold the regional rights to Comcast, and Comcast decided to make this a way to build cable distribution in all of the Mountain West Conference markets,â Checketts said. âThatâs where the biggest mistake was made.
âThen it just got to be mistake after mistake. And the worst thing they did was the way they treated BYU.â
Behind the scenes, BYU officials have been trying to get what they were promised since The Mtn. launched. Later in 2006, Checketts arranged a meeting in New York between CBS and Comcast executives and BYUâs top athletic adminstration, including university President Cecil O. Samuelson.
âPresident Samuelson made just an impassioned plea [for them] to live up to the promises theyâd made to BYU once upon a time. And he was assured that they were going to do it,â Checketts said. âThey apologized to him.â
But a few months later, CBS Câs Tony Petitti left to run The Baseball Network. âAnd the Comcast guy just didnât live up to one thing that he said heâd do,â Checketts said.
âWe fought it and fought it and fought it,â Holmoe said. âThose are things that were not delineated early on in the contract. That was one of the issues that we squabbled about for years and years.â
Mountain West Conference commissioner Craig Thompson declined to comment for this story. A spokesman said the league preferred to focus on its membership going forward.
A big part of BYUâs frustration was that The Mtn. couldnât gain traction nationally. No one involved seemed to understand how difficult it would be to gain distribution.
âIncluding me,â Holmoe said.
Today, The Mtn. is in about 8.5 million homes, compared with 55 million for BYUTV and nearly 100 million for ESPN and ESPN2. And Comcastâs refusal to allow BYU to telecast games on BYUTV remains a sore point.
âOur Fresno State basketball game last week wasnât on TV,â Holmoe said. âThey chose not to do it and didnât allow us to do it. We could have shown it live on BYUTV.â
The Mtn. has relaxed it policies a bit this season. Itâs allowing an Albuquerque, N.M., station to televise several New Mexico basketball games, and spokesman Hayne Ellis said KBYU could have carried the BYU-Fresno State game. But not BYUTV, which has those 55 million homes.
âOur goal is to ultimately expand the distribution for the network. And parceling off what youâve already paid the rights fees for is not really conducive to doing that,â Ellis said. âYou donât want to work against yourself.â
But BYU felt like it wasnât ever going to get what had been promised.
âThis was a partnership we were hoping would work out. We were hoping we would get to the point where we could do live broadcasts,â Holmoe said. âWhat they ended up always falling back on is, âWe donât have the distribution to allow you to do that.â Well, in reality, would they ever have had the distribution? Thatâs what it came down to.â
And Checketts said it was more like BYU and Utah were forced out of the MWC.
âIâm not critical of the schools at all, Iâm critical of the conference and the television partners,â he said. âThey had a great opportunity that they completely blew.â
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