There are 82 million reasons why the Mountain West and its members believe dumping broadcast giant ESPN for broadcast midget College Sports TV was a good thing. Conversely, there is only one reason why Cox Cable subscribers may be a little more skeptical.
The new TV home of the Rebels still isn't available on Cox.
It has been 14 months since the MWC and its constituents decided to follow the Steve Miller Band's advice and take the money ($82 million over seven years) and run. They didn't make a move on El Paso, which would have been a great big hassle, in that UTEP is happy playing ball in Conference USA -- which I might add, has TV deals with ESPN and CSTV.
But what the MWC has run into is a major technical difficulty in Las Vegas and San Diego, two of its biggest markets.
CSTV is no closer to signing a deal with Cox Cable in Las Vegas and San Diego than it was at this time last year. If anything, the sides seem to be farther apart. Their negotiations, at least based on the tone of a CSTV press briefing at the Thomas & Mack Center on Tuesday, have turned contentious.
"They have elected not to carry us at this point," said CSTV Co-Chairman Dave Checketts, the Utah native and sports media mogul who created the successful Madison Square Garden network and later served as president of the New York Knicks and Utah Jazz.
"It's not like they haven't been invited. We made them the same offer that we made everybody else."
Checketts would not disclose what that offer was and neither would Cox, other than to say it would not enter into a relationship with any network in which subscribers would incur additional costs.
"Do we have an interest in the opportunity? Absolutely," said Cox spokeswoman Stephanie Stallworth. "But only if it makes sense for our customers."
Because somebody didn't do their homework in the Mountain West and/or CST camps, it has put UNLV in a ticklish situation with Cox Cable, one of its major benefactors.
"As a customer of Cox, if I can't get CSTV, I will switch to DISH Network," UNLV athletic director Mike Hamrick said in reference to a local satellite provider on which CSTV is available. "That's what the Hamrick family will do."
That might not have been the smartest thing for the head of the Hamrick household to say while he was sitting no more than 50 feet from the entrance to a basketball arena with the letters C-O-X plastered on its facade.
Cox Communications paid $5 million to put its name on the front of Cox Pavilion, the home of the Lady Rebels, which is conjoined with the Thomas & Mack. That relationship also has had its rocky moments.
In 2002, the Lady Rebels pulled the plug after just eight games at Cox, moving the remainder of its schedule to the Thomas & Mack in a decision that went over at Cox about as well as a widespread outage during an electrical storm.
UNLV sure has a strange way of thanking its sponsors, as even university President Carol Harter was talking tough Tuesday. "I cannot believe that people are not going to write letters (of protest to Cox)," she said.
I can. I was in a sports bar the weekend before last when I had to beg, borrow and all but steal one of the pub's 52 TV sets to watch the Rebels' game against Wyoming because nobody else wanted to see it.
As MWC Commissioner Craig Thompson told me, it's still 10 months until the start of the next football season, "where the rubber will meet the road." When that happens, I fully expect, based on Cox Cable's prickly negotiations with ESPN a couple of years back, that the sides will find a common ground that makes sense to both. Not to mention a lot of dollars. Then they'll sign on the bottom line about 10 minutes before kickoff.
Even so, Checketts and Thompson and Hamrick and Harter, et al., had better strap on their batting helmets. When it comes to playing hardball at the negotiating table, Cox isn't going to be an easy out.
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