I think it's likely our home game with Stanford would have been on ESPN or ESPN2 anyway (ESPN is obligated to broadcast 5 regular season CUSA home games - our game with Baylor was selected to be one of these and the only one of ESPN's 5 to be slated for the ESPN main channel).

Nevertheless a Friday night (USA time) game a week before the rest of the college season starts at least means this game would not be sharing the national sports viewing audience with other college games.

However, we do lose the potential of slyly scheduling Stanford for an 11:00 am CDT kickoff and catching them sleepwalking. They laid an egg at Northwestern recently (last year or maybe the year before?) in similar circumstances, and that was one of Stanford's best teams and a Northwestern team that proved to be nothing special. Houston heat and humidity could have been an equalizing factor as well.