Update pg 4: Boise now suing MWC - Boise State/MWC marriage in serious trouble

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In a statement issued on Friday evening, Boise State admitted it had “some hesitation” about ending its longstanding relationship with ESPN as part of the Mountain West’s new TV rights deal and refuted the conference’s claim that this would be the last time the Broncos’ home games would be negotiated separately.

During a conference call on Jan. 9, Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson said conference members met in December and decided they wanted more equity in future deals. But Boise State said its decision to rejoin the conference in 2012 was predicated, in part, on the right to negotiate its home games separately and that cannot be changed by a conference vote.

“Boise State’s decision to join the conference was predicated on a number of negotiated provisions, including the right to separately negotiate material terms of media rights relating to our home games,” a university spokesperson said in Friday’s statement. “This is stated in our conference agreement and cannot be changed by any vote of the membership or conflicting agreement. We will not support any change to this provision and are in the process of weighing our options to move forward.”

The Mountain West did not immediately return a call seeking a comment on Friday night.

The Mountain West announced its new TV deal on Jan. 9, cutting ESPN out of the mix for regular-season games and handing rights for Boise State home games to Fox and road games to CBS Sports. ESPN played a pivotal role in making Boise State the national brand it was, but the deal with Fox and CBS was just too good to pass up.

The new deal is valued at $270 million, according to Thompson. Boise State’s cut of that should go up from $2.9 million to somewhere in the neighborhood of $5.7 million. That additional revenue was obviously hard to turn down, but Boise State said the possibility of earlier kickoffs and added exposure for the entire conference also went into going along with the deal.

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