Push for Independence

Greg Wrubell shares some thought on how BYU evolved toward independence.



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My remaining unanswered question is from the MWC's perspective--Why?



Is this as it seems to be, the person biting the hand that feeds it? I'm thinking if I'm the CEO of Comcast and someone allowed BYU to slide out of the conference for issues related in the least to rebroadcast rights, then that individual would have been pointed in the direction of finding another job. Comcast is the loser of forcing BYU to seek independence and I can't understand what is driving them. Did they really disbelieve we'd really go independent? Is it just one of those situations you find in life where the people that have somehow landed at the top are idiots? I'm just trying to understand.



I can see where the MWC commissioner and other schools have had a bad attitude toward BYU because I don't think there was anything they could do to keep us with Comcast reneging on some gentleman's agreements, but to have burnt the bridges they have done to me does nothing for them them but give them individually the opportunity to vent. Yes, Boise is a great FB institution, but that's not going to get them far in the scheme of TV dollars.



Would Boise have pulled the trigger to bolt the WAC had they known Utah, BYU and TCU were leaving? I have to think not.



Tomorrow will not be a day likely remembered pleasantly by most of our former conference members of the MWC, but a program has to do what it has to do.

comcast was greedy and it has bit them multiple times. From the start they charged too much money and did not build their base. Poor distribution led to losing BYU and probably the channel. If they had gone for eyeballs from the start, they might have had true national distribution, more money and kept the Y. They were more interested in using it to get more cable subscribers.

scott715 wrote:
comcast was greedy and it has bit them multiple times. From the start they charged too much money and did not build their base. Poor distribution led to losing BYU and probably the channel. If they had gone for eyeballs from the start, they might have had true national distribution, more money and kept the Y. They were more interested in using it to get more cable subscribers.

Same the that DirecTV did with the Big 10 network (believe me, I was living in Ohio at the time). After a full year, and after they had gotten as many people to switch from Cable to satellite as they thought they could, they let Time Warner have the channel.

My assumption was that the MWC contract must have been small fries to Comcast Since it wasn't even worth their effort to put the MTN on their OWN network in other regions. If their goal was national distribution, then they have internal problems far greater than we see.



I am so glad it is over!!

Very good question if that is true. It wouldn't cost them anything on their own system.

From TH quotes from Athlon Sports says it all:



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“(The Mountain West) didn’t have the foresight to see what we wanted,” Holmoe says. “There were nine teams in the conference, with Boise State coming in. They knew we were unhappy with the TV arrangement, but it didn’t seem to matter.”



So my point is and was that someone at Commcast should have lost their job over this debacle that was controllable. Maybe it was that they want the mtn network to go down because they understand that they can't make money with it. That's always been a suspicion and would be the only thing that made sense to me if they were not going to grow the segment.