C-USA's craptastic television deal is due to two factors. The conference was the first to renegotiate their TV rights after the last wave of conference realignment, and was a test case for just how hard a G5 conference could be screwed down. G5 schools negotiating after that had a better idea of what might happen and positioned themselves to avoid it as far as possible. Also our last two conference commissioners have been weak. Britton Banowsky was pretty spineless, although UAB owes him a debt for making our return to football in the conference much less painful than it might have been. The current commisioner, Judy MacLeod, is an outright disaster.

ESPN is such a power broker that turning away from them has many hidden costs, such as help in scheduling quality OOC games in basketball. As an outsider, I have seen a lot of snickering at the MAC's off night scheduling in football, but, yes, you're on ESPN and we're on three different TV providers, and their commentators are generally trash and some fans don't have access to one or another of them. That is supposed to be fixed in upcoming seasons, but I'm cynical about that. I'll believe that when I see it.