(01-24-2020 10:56 AM)b0ndsj0ns Wrote:  

(01-23-2020 05:39 PM)arkstfan Wrote:  Back when Boise State was Big East bound, their president who is no poker face, had told numerous people within the intercollegiate athletics community that Boise State had to make $4 million more in Big East than MWC for the deal to make financial sense.

My sense of the situation is MWC has done the math and has concluded Boise State cannot leave MWC and be in a better economic situation unless they get a P5. Maybe the math sort of works out if WCC would invite them but WCC showed no such inclination last time and they were going to subsidize Big West to take them.

I think MWC's membership has concluded that they end up no worse off if Boise State leaves as long as the Broncos are getting favored nation status, they were probably within a few dollars (in athletic budget terms) of exactly the same place in a contract without Boise State vs a contract with Boise State that gives the Broncos extra money. Therefore they are more than willing to put the Broncos on notice that they need to leave or accept being equal partners.

That calculation does not take into account how much ESPN values now losing all of Boise's content. Do they value it enough to increase the AAC's contract with them in the league enough to make it make financial sense? ESPN has shown in the past they are plenty comfortable stealing properties from leagues they are losing and shifting them to leagues they own, so this would be right in line with the ESPN playbook. The question is do they care about losing all of Boise's games that much?

Doubt it if ArkStfan is correct. The MW special deal will pay Boise about 5.8 million. An AAC “football only” deal will pay Boise 4.9 million with a full share of media income from the WWC/BigSky/Big West to add to it, I don’t think the media deal for any of those Olympic sports entities is significant.

In short, the AAC would have to get a raise of about a million and Boise would have to join as a full all-sports member to generate the 4 million dollar differential ArkStfan described as necessary to make the deal work. That would require ESPN paying the AAC UConns full share and an additional 12 million to get the Boise content. Seems unlikely...unless the AAC is willing to carve out some sort of special deal for Boise....which seems like a bad idea based on the MW experience.