MWC TV: Still fuzzy

Ask anybody, this is getting old. Three years after the Mountain West Conference launched its groundbreaking television network, and still, complications from the controversial arrangement are making it hard for college football fans to watch their favorite teams. This time, fans who subscribe to the DirecTV satellite system won't be able to see the Utah Utes or the Brigham Young Cougars play big games Saturday -- underscoring once again the difficult options faced by a league whose aspirations often outpace its national appeal.

"It's not the best situation," the league's associate commissioner Javan Hedlund acknowledged. "It's not something you want to go through, but the current TV deal still is better than what it would have been."

Nevertheless, many fans are tired of hearing it.

Thousands are upset that one of the biggest games of the season -- the No. 16 Cougars against unbeaten No. 10 TCU, at LaVell Edwards Stadium -- won't be available to DirecTV customers because it's being broadcast on Versus, a network that DirecTV has blocked from its satellite system amid a contract dispute. Same with the No. 19 Utes against Air Force at Rice-Eccles Stadium.

It looks even worse for the league that rival ESPN will broadcast its popular "College GameDay" preview shows from Edwards Stadium, despite not being able to show the game itself.

BYU's Bronco Mendenhall certainly noticed.

"When you consider maybe the major entity that

covers college football recognizing the value of this particular matchup, and then really going out of their way to find the very best way to draw attention to it, you would think that would have been the philosophy held by others -- especially our partners," the coach said. "And if that is not the case, then I would be alarmed and think that there is something wrong."

The irony is that fans cheered DirecTV just last year, when it finally added The Mtn. network to its system, seemingly assuring they could see all the games.

But the league agreed to move today's marquee games from its own network to its partner Versus in order to broaden their audience, something it refused to do -- amid much complaint -- with last season's rivalry game between the Utes and Cougars. Versus is available in about 75 million households nationwide, compared with about 20 million for The Mtn.

"It's an incredibly unfortunate situation for everybody," said Kim Carver, the vice president and general manager of The Mtn.

Disputes like the one between DirecTV and Versus are not uncommon in the world of pay television, but this one illustrates the complexities that make it hard for the Mountain West to get everything it would like out of a television contract.

Largely, it comes down to population.

Since the league has a small fan base by major college sports standards, it generally can't command the kind of television audience that a game involving, say, the SEC or the Pac-10 Conference would. That's why ESPN offered the league much less money to renew its original seven-year, $49 million contract -- which is one reason the league teamed up instead with the Comcast cable company and the CBS College Sports Network to form The Mtn.

The other major reason is that ESPN wanted the Mountain West to play football games on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, something school officials and fans around the league adamantly opposed. If the Mountain West had agreed to a new deal with ESPN, teams such as the Utes and Cougars would be playing on those nights -- and mostly on sister networks such as ESPN2 or ESPNU, Hedlund said.

"Some people might think that's great," he said. "But how many people are going to be in the stands on a Tuesday or a Wednesday night?"

Politically, it's hard for the league to do much pushing in the current dispute.

If it rags on DirecTV, the league risks having the company dump The Mtn. after all those months of lobbying to get it on the air. If it tars and feathers Versus, it's ripping a company owned by Comcast -- the league's partner and co-owner of The Mtn.

(In a fascinating illustration of the many conflicts within the industry, Versus last month took out a newspaper ad in several cities blasting DirecTV and urging customers to switch to DISH Network, which still does not carry The Mtn.)

And the league can't just offer up its best games to outside networks such as ESPN.

For one thing, such a "third-party" distribution agreement would have to come from Comcast, league officials said. And that wouldn't happen unless the current TV partners could not assure that the game would be available in at least 70 million homes, as stipulated in their 10-year, $120 million deal with the league.

All of that also presumes that another network would want to carry a particular game, at the date and time the league wanted to play it. That's unlikely, since other networks such as ESPN have other expensive programming already in place, such as games involving higher profile leagues.

Even moving games within partner networks can be troublesome.

League officials refused to move last year's rivalry game to Versus or CBS College Sports, for example, because it feared diluting the value that the game brought to The Mtn. What's more, each of those networks has programming in place like any other, and the restriction of contractual broadcast windows makes shuffling difficult.

Bumping this week's big games from Versus could hurt its bargaining power with DirecTV, too, by effectively giving the satellite provider access to the very programming that Versus is trying to persuade it to buy.

Nobody knows how long the dispute will last, or what will happen if it drags into next football season, when another eight Mountain West football games are scheduled to be bumped over to Versus. Many analysts figured the dispute would have been over by now, spurred by the start of the National Hockey League season to which Versus holds broadcast rights.

For the moment, then, fans might have to take solace in the possibility that Comcast will merge with NBC Universal -- negotiations have been ongoing -- and create what The Wall Street Journal called a potential rival to ESPN that could greatly expand the Mountain West's reach. And if that happened, maybe big games like the ones this weekend wouldn't be so hard to get on television.

"That wouldn't hurt," Carver said. "All I can do is keep my fingers crossed."

mcl@sltrib.com