For the first time in its Mountain West Conference membership, the University of Hawaii will share in the conference pool of football television rights fees.
The conference announced a six-year, $270 million media rights deal for football and basketball with CBS Sports and Fox on Thursday that could be worth several hundred thousand dollars annually to UH as a football-only member, though figures were not yet available, officials said.
That would be in addition to what UH receives from Spectrum when their renewal agreement is concluded later this month.
Conference officials declined to provide an immediate breakdown of the member distribution and UH athletic director David Matlin said in a text, “Until the (Spectrum) deal is done it can’t be accurately answered.”
As a condition of its 2011 membership agreement, UH has received only its local rights fees from Spectrum, which began at $2.3 million annually and have reached approximately $2.6 million. Under its terms, UH would only receive a share of the revenue pool if all the other members’ shares exceeded UH’s Spectrum income.
In UH’s eight years of membership through the 2019 season, that did not come close to happening, as Boise State took home $2.9 million and the other 10 averaged approximately $1.1 million.
Under the new deal, Boise State, which has had a so-called “carve-out” deal that markets its games separately, is expected to receive significantly more than the rest of the conference. CBS will have the rights to the Broncos’ conference road games, while Fox gets the Boise home contests.
For the MWC, CBS will be the primary partner, with the first choice of 23 football games and up to 10 additional picks after Fox also picks 23 games. ESPN has been replaced by Fox and UH’s only appearances on ESPN will come in nonconference road or bowl games.
The MWC hopes to sell remaining games to a separate partner.
While the new deal will triple what most MWC teams receive, it still pales in comparison to the deals for Power 5 conference schools that receive $30 million to $50 million each.
MWC Commissioner Craig Thompson said the conference decided against a longer term deal.
“We implicitly and steadfastly said we would not entertain any discussion of a term longer than six years,” he said. “We weren’t willing to go eight, nine, 10 years or more just to inflate the numbers. We feel the next five years are going to bring change in the market … ”
“This is an exciting day for the Mountain West Conference,” Matlin said. “The six-year term and all linear broadcast highlight this deal. Hats off to the MW office and the MW TV subcommittee for finalizing this deal that will make our conference stronger.”
