(02-07-2020 04:30 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(02-07-2020 12:46 PM)Wedge Wrote:  

(02-07-2020 12:22 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  

(02-07-2020 12:11 PM)Wedge Wrote:  

(02-07-2020 10:46 AM)johnbragg Wrote:  They had the initial skirmish. The loser-and-haters came at Boise, tried to muscle Boise. Boise called them on it and they backed down.

There will probably be a rematch in 6 years. But this confrontation happened, the MWC tried to buffalo Boise State into accepting the end of the Reentry Agreement, and Boise stood up to them successfully.

It was bad timing for the anti-Boise contingent to bring this out into the open when they did. The schools probably felt some pressure to confirm that they were going forward with the new Fox/CBS contract, and dropped the dispute for now to reassure the TV networks. The rest of the MWC will hope that Boise is in a weaker position a few years down the road.

Maybe----but its not like they didnt know the timing or the situation going into the decision. Despite that---two schools were willing to take the dispute to an even higher level by voting to end the deal immediately. Regardless of the outcome---the one thing we can take away from the incident is that there is wide spread tremendous resentment of the special Boise deal roiling just beneath the surface in the MW---and that will continue to fester regardless of any unity preaching joint statement that gets issued in the aftermath of this dispute.

Might be that only one or two MWC members feel really strongly about this, and the rest went along with it initially, but backed off (against the votes of the one or two who still feel strongly about it).

And, the money might not even be the biggest issue. It's easy to imagine San Diego State, for example, being more irritated about Boise being guaranteed better TV exposure than the rest of the league gets, and SDSU would feel more entitled than the rest of the MWC to complain, because SDSU has a better football team than most of them.

Compare the 2019 TV for Boise State and SDSU to see why SDSU might want either better TV exposure for themselves or less for Boise:
Boise State 2019 games, with TV outlets: https://fbschedules.com/ncaa-2019/team/boise-state
SDSU 2019 games, with TV outlets: https://fbschedules.com/ncaa-2019/team/san-diego-state

Even if they weren't guaranteed better exposure by the contract, Boise would still get better exposure because TV executives would choose their games more often.

USC isn't guaranteed better exposure than Utah. But in 2019 Utah only had 3 games on major OTA networks compared to 6 for USC. Utah games were dumped on the Pac-12 network 4 times compared to 1 for USC. This is despite Utah having a better team.

True, but that comparison only goes so far, because the audience gap between USC vs. generic and Utah vs. generic is far greater than the gap between Boise vs. generic and SDSU vs. generic. Not only does USC have the name brand to pull in casual fans outside each team's local area, but the LA metro area alone has more than 6 times as many people as the whole state of Utah. I'm not any happier about USC reflexively getting better TV than anyone else is, but there are good reasons why USC doesn't need a guarantee of better TV exposure, and those reasons either don't apply to Boise State or apply to Boise in a miniscule way compared to USC.

The obvious argument for the MWC members to make here is that if Boise thinks they're as valuable to MWC TV rights as USC is to Pac-12 TV rights, then they don't really need guaranteed exposure and might as well give it up. But of course, Boise is perfectly within its rights to say, you guys signed this contract and we're holding you to it.