In the end this is what will happen....
CUSA will be playing 90% (guess est) on a Saturday. There's not one fan on this board of a SBC school that wouldn't give up a nu...pinky, to play all their football games at a decent kickoff time on a Saturday afternoon or evening. As a fan that will be more important than the across the board Olympic sports that will bite the bullet for any money lost on the CUSA TV contract...
football will not take the hit
basketball will not take the hit..at least not for the "basketball schools" in CUSA
One way to look at this deal is...CUSA put more of a value on Saturday football than the dollars playing on a Tuesday/Wednesday would have brought in.
As a fan...less TV money vs great Saturday football is a no brainer. Saturday afternoon/evening football wins out everytime.
So lets do the math and we will see what those 5 to 6 Saturday afternoon games adds more to the bottom line. A easy way to do that is to say a 5,000 difference in attendance for a Wednesday night vs a Saturday afternoon . That would be $100,000 a game at $20 a ticket. I think we can add in $5 a person for one drink on average ....$25,000 with $10,000 of that going to the school. So now we are up to $110,000 with just a 5,000 increase in fans. Work that out for 2 week night games out of the 6 and you now made up $220,000
Still doesn't make up for all of it but to us fans...WE DON'T REALLY CARE. All we want is what's best for us and Saturday football . Do we really care Track and Field or soccer or volleyball or softball or baseball gets their budgets cut to make up the difference?
We can look at CUSA's TV contract and how poor it is till the cows come but it won't change the fact you can take away a million dollars from the numbers in this spreadsheet (taken from what each school reported) and those CUSA schools (for the most part) are still bringing in millions more. These are 2015 numbers so even if espn or fox doesn't want to pay....
someone is seeing a value in CUSA
The numbers under rights are from 2015 and the last numbers are what each school brought in the year before changing conferences.