The problems RedOscar mentioned, you mean.

I definitely sympathize with the alums living far from Stanford. I live about 15 minutes from campus, so home games are rarely an issue for me (except when it comes to parking and the mess that is the Knight Management Center). It’s the away games and how FSN/CSN prioritized and scheduled them that makes people so angry over here.

I think in football, at least for this past season, the most egregious example of failure to show the local team (well, one of them at least) was when Stanford played ASU. That game was super tight all the way into the fourth quarter. Couple it with Cal nearly beating the Ducks at the same time as the Stanford game and it made for some seriously stressed out people trying to figure out how to watch the Stanford game and the Cal game at the same time despite being on different sport packages for Comcast. I think that was also the day that Wazzu beat Oregon State, which no one outside of Corvallis and Pullman was able to see.

In basketball, forget it. No one saw the Stanford men beat Washington the other night because ALL of the regional networks wanted to focus on the Matt Knight Arena opening, featuring USC and the team predicted to come in last in the conference, the Ducks.

of the LSN deal :|

I’d like to see a deal for $25M+ per school (in today’s dollars, not the make-believe “over 30 years average” number), a not crazy-long time-frame, and at least reasonable access. If Fox gives a deal that’s way better than ESPN’s numbers, so be it.

I’d also like to see a Pac-12 Network as part of the deal, since there’s still plenty of content that never gets seen, and this would be a big boost to getting more league-wide games and events publicized (even if it is subscriber-only). I do agree that it should be more for secondary content and NOT for the bigger games.

FWIW, I’m beginning to suspect that $25M / school is the minimum amount that could keep everyone happy enough to avoid blowing things up. So IMO the cash is more important than the rest.

ESPN/ABC has total control over the conference start times if they have the conference’s broadcasting rights. As we’ve seen in the past, that can be good (moving Stanford/UO to 5PM instead of 8:15PM) or bad (scheduling Stanford vs. Wake Forest at 11:20PM ET). They can also schedule Thursday and Friday night games, as they did with Cal next season and the Civil War and Territorial Bowl the past two seasons (having done Thursday night football in high school in Texas, that is anything but fun to watch or experience). What good is exposure if no one is going to watch it?

Plus, ESPN/ABC already has three other conferences with which they have a deal in place. They get first dibs at whatever CBS doesn’t pick up for SEC football. They broadcast as many Big Ten afternoon football games as possible (the 12PM PT games). Pac-12 football on ESPN/ABC means evening and late-night games for the East Coast in order to ensure that the Big Ten, SEC, and ACC football games are shown. And they pick up all the top-tier ACC basketball games, followed by Big Ten games. Even if ESPN/ABC goes to its regional broadcasts, the Pac-12 has to compete with three other conferences just for afternoon games, and even then the chances of it being shown to a majority, if not all, of the country are small. No one in Big 12 country saw Stanford-USC this past season, the Oregon game was relegated to ESPN3 in Illinois, Indiana and areas north of NYC, and the Arizona game wasn’t broadcast in vast swaths of ACC-country.

I forgot where I read it, but back when the ADs were discussing divisions for football and starting-up a television network, I think it was Lisa Love of ASU that said that there are lots of athletes across North America that know the Big Ten brand because of their network, not because of ESPN. Even if a game is on ESPN3, people have to go searching for it instead of simply turning on the television and entering a channel. If exposure is a priority, practically anyone BUT ESPN/ABC would be good simply because of who the Pac-12 would have to compete with for broadcasting games.