You knew it was only a matter of time before Al-Jazeera grabbed a piece of that college football action. beIN Sports, its American-based cable channel that focuses on soccer and sports of international (mostly European) interest has bought a piece of Conference USA's TV package. It will air 10 football games, 10 basketball games, and a bunch of Olympic sports.
beIN Sports most valuable property right now is LaLiga so yes, if you've been longing for a Barcelona/Pitt Doubleheader, you may get your wish when Pitt travels to Marshall in 2020.
The sad news for CUSA is they became the first conference in history to see its TV deal worsen. They went from getting about $1 million per team to around $200,000 per team. This is mostly due to the conference being the hardest hit by conference expansion. Under the old deal, they had East Carolina, Central Florida, Memphis, Tulane, SMU, Houston, and Tulsa. They backfilled with Western Kentucky, Middle Tennessee State, Old Dominion, Charlotte, Florida Internatonal, Florida Atlantic, Louisiana Tech, North Texas, and Texas-San Antonio So, the conference lost a ton of value in both football and basketball.
If you are still reading this post, you really are a diehard college sports fan so I will continue. CUSA's deal is pretty unique in that in involves a lot of different parties:
- ESPN: 5 games plus the conference championship game. Also any game that is not picked up by other networks falls to ESPN3
- CBS Sports Network: 5 football games, 5 basketball games, and bball tournament
- American Sports Network (which isn't a traditional network, its a syndicator like Raycom): at least 15 football games
- beinSports: 10 football, 10 basketball, and Olympic sports
So, if you do the math real quick, that means in the entire season, there may be as few as 35 CUSA games on TV, which is about 2 per week. I know the league sucks but with a million networks out there televising live sports, its hard to believe they couldn't get a lot more games televised than that. Makes me wonder if all those 1-AA schools who moved up to CUSA are 2nd guessing those decisions.
beIN Sports most valuable property right now is LaLiga so yes, if you've been longing for a Barcelona/Pitt Doubleheader, you may get your wish when Pitt travels to Marshall in 2020.
The sad news for CUSA is they became the first conference in history to see its TV deal worsen. They went from getting about $1 million per team to around $200,000 per team. This is mostly due to the conference being the hardest hit by conference expansion. Under the old deal, they had East Carolina, Central Florida, Memphis, Tulane, SMU, Houston, and Tulsa. They backfilled with Western Kentucky, Middle Tennessee State, Old Dominion, Charlotte, Florida Internatonal, Florida Atlantic, Louisiana Tech, North Texas, and Texas-San Antonio So, the conference lost a ton of value in both football and basketball.
If you are still reading this post, you really are a diehard college sports fan so I will continue. CUSA's deal is pretty unique in that in involves a lot of different parties:
- ESPN: 5 games plus the conference championship game. Also any game that is not picked up by other networks falls to ESPN3
- CBS Sports Network: 5 football games, 5 basketball games, and bball tournament
- American Sports Network (which isn't a traditional network, its a syndicator like Raycom): at least 15 football games
- beinSports: 10 football, 10 basketball, and Olympic sports
So, if you do the math real quick, that means in the entire season, there may be as few as 35 CUSA games on TV, which is about 2 per week. I know the league sucks but with a million networks out there televising live sports, its hard to believe they couldn't get a lot more games televised than that. Makes me wonder if all those 1-AA schools who moved up to CUSA are 2nd guessing those decisions.
