(01-09-2020 06:19 PM)SoCalBobcat78 Wrote:  

(01-09-2020 05:18 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  I think they did quite well---and did an exceptional job of raising their linear exposure with those OTA national games on FOX and CBS. Those are huge.

Financially, it looks like a very good deal. The MWC will be the only FBS conference without an ESPN contract, the only FBS conference not televised on the ESPN family of networks. That ends the Boise State-ESPN relationship, which has worked well for both. It will be interesting to see how the new relationships work out.

It's not for football, but the Big East has done well despite not being on the ESPN family of networks.

The main thing that fans/observers need to take into account is that the ratings are inherently going to be lower on FS1 (and even more so on CBSSN) compared to ESPN. Getting a 1.0 rating on ESPN is much different compared to getting a 1.0 rating on FS1 and people in the industry understand the difference when comparing conferences. (I roll my eyes every time that I see a post that Conference X is getting way higher ratings on ESPN compared to Conference Y on FS1 or another sports network because it's just not an apples-to-apples comparison. You can clearly see the difference with the leagues that split packages between ESPN and Fox, such as the Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12.)

The other thing is that if ESPN is going to get the current CBS package of SEC games, then that's going to have a very large impact on what's getting shown on the ESPN mothership versus ESPN2/ESPNU/etc. A lot of games that may have been on ESPN in recent years are going to get pushed to ESPN2 and, in turn, games that have been ESPN2 are going to get pushed to ESPNU. That's almost certainly going to impact the G5 leagues like the MWC the most, so the exposure on the ESPN linear networks was likely going to get reduced for any non-P5 league, anyway.

ESPN+ is a way better streaming platform than the CBS All Access streaming platform is you're a sports fan, though. The MWC potentially sending games to CBS All Access (as they're being coy about CBS putting those games on either a linear channel or streaming) is a definite downgrade. Frankly, unless the exclusive streaming games are on ESPN+, Amazon (which does limited sports) or Netflix (which does no live sports at all), I don't think it's worth much for a sports league at all outside of simply giving exposure to games that wouldn't have been shown on a linear channel, anyway.