UH won’t be cashing in big on MWC’s new TV deal

The Mountain West Conference is apparently close to announcing a new multi-million-dollar TV deal with ESPN, but let’s hold the applause in Hawaii while we examine the fine print first.

Yes, the conference stands to take in an average of approximately $18 million per year from the combined wallets of ESPN and CBS over the life of a reported seven-year deal that would run through 2019-20.

But, as it looks now, University of Hawaii officials acknowledge, the school "isn’t likely" to directly share in any of that moolah.

And while MWC members who play national TV games on specified days of the week will earn six-figure bonuses this year, UH said it will not.

Instead, what UH will do is keep all of its roughly $2.3 million per year local rights fees from Oceanic Time Warner Cable, officials said. Or, as they put it, UH will see its pay-per-view and local rights money "protected."

"We won’t participate in (the national payoff) in terms of shares," said Ben Jay, UH athletic director. "We get to keep our Oceanic money, so we won’t participate in this deal until everybody in the Mountain West gets a TV share (equal to) $2.3 million."

Only when all the other 11 conference members receive payments that rise above $2.3 million each for football will Hawaii, a football-only member, begin to share in the national TV bucks.

So, basically, it is possible for UH to end up receiving less TV money overall in 2013 than it did in 2010, its penultimate season in the late, lamented Western Athletic Conference. UH earned a combined $2.58 million in 2010 from its local and WAC TV deals.

The unknown here, with ESPN reportedly to get up to 22 MWC football games per year on top of CBS’ picks, is how much that might reduce the inventory for Oceanic? Will it be left, as it was in 2012, with the crumbs: Lamar, UNLV, New Mexico and South Alabama?

When UH signed off on its March 4, 2011, membership pact with the MWC, it was desperate to leave a sinking WAC. And it wanted to retain the lucrative local package with Oceanic, something nobody in either conference had.

The hope was that when the MWC got around to negotiating a new national TV agreement, it would bring in enough money without watering down the local deal that, in time, UH would enrich itself from both accounts.

Remember, this was in the heady, cash-flowing days when the Pac-12 and Big Ten were signing billion dollar deals.

Now, nobody thought the MWC would pull down $250 million annually, but the hope was for a tidy raise.

Instead it is purported to be slight, and while Pac-12 and Big Ten teams will receive, on average, $20 million per school per year over the life of their deals, the MWC will be cutting up, maybe, $20-$22 million (including the yet-to-be sold football championship game) to feed 12 mouths.

Perhaps, in time, the MWC will grow its returns and its much-ballyhooed venture into a digital network will produce significant returns. You hope so.

But, in the meantime, reports of the pending MWC deal aren’t likely to inflate UH’s bank account.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.