Imagine Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson stepping to the podium on Zoom this week and announcing:

“With the first overall pick in the 2020 MWC football TV draft, the CBS Sports Network selects the Hawaii at Fresno State game on Oct. 24.”

OK, maybe the sixth or seventh overall selection.

Welcome to this week in the MWC, where five days after the conference announced its truncated schedule, its TV partners, CBS Sports and Fox, are on the clock to pick which games they will show as the minutes are quickly ticking off to the season openers now just 18 days away.

If you are the Rainbow Warriors, there is a lot more than just viewership that could be riding on how many UH games are picked up and where they land on the clicker.

Under terms of the new six-year, $270 million TV deal announced in January, CBS, which is ponying up the biggest pile of cash, gets the first seven picks and at least 23 overall. Fox, which has less moolah in the enterprise, has 16 selections. In order to meet the 39-game contract requirement, after the opening week, some games may be switched to Thursdays or Fridays to suit TV scheduling purposes.

A third tier partner — and negotiations are said to be underway — would get to pick among whatever is left after the selections by CBS and Fox.

All of the selections are expected to be concluded this week. “I’m crossing my fingers,” a conference spokesman said Monday.

Fox replaced ESPN in the partnership lineup, so, for the first time in seven years, UH will not have any regular-season games on the most visible platform. With the ESPN-owned and operated SoFi Hawaii Bowl having announced its cancellation for this year, there may be no ESPN bowl for UH, either.

That’s the easy part. More complicated is the question of how much — with a COVID-19 delayed start of the season and the necessity of trying to jam eight games into eight weeks between Oct. 24 and Dec. 12 — will UH be able to satisfy of its Mountain West obligations and its local agreement with Spectrum?

A clause in the conference agreements puts a four-game ceiling on how much inventory the partners can collectively take from UH’s schedule. That wasn’t a problem pre-pandemic when UH was set for a 13-game regular-season schedule and, for the first time in its nine-year MWC membership, looking forward to sharing in the overall payout.

For its first eight years, UH, a football-only member of the conference, received only the approximately $2.3 million it earned from its local Spectrum rights deal. This year UH is due to not only cash in on an enhanced Spectrum deal that averages $3.1 million a year through 2024 but to also get an as yet unannounced pro-rated slice of the conference pie.

Then came COVID-19, complicating the balancing act between UH’s conference and local contracts.

The local rights deal requires UH to deliver at least seven pay-per-view games to Spectrum in order to receive the full $2.92 million fee for 2020. The contract calls for a fee reduction for each game less than seven and a cap of just $750,000 if four or more games are subtracted.

Those are no small considerations, especially in a year when the pandemic figures to pummel the athletic department’s piggy bank by greatly reducing or eliminating ticket-buying fans in the stands.

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