U., Y. will play Thursday football

CSTV never promised us no Thursday-night football games.

You may recall that when the Mountain West Conference decided to leave ESPN and sign a deal with fledgling CSTV — a deal that takes effect this fall — one of the reasons league officials cited was the desire to return to something more closely resembling a traditional schedule for football and basketball.

No Tuesday or Wednesday night football games. No Monday-at-10 p.m. starts for basketball games. No 10 a.m. or 4 p.m. starts for Saturday football games forced upon schools that want to put their games on local TV but have to avoid blackout windows imposed by ESPN.

But CSTV never promised us no Thursday-night football games. And MWC members Utah and BYU will each have a pair of those this fall — conference games at home and on the road.

Utah hosts TCU on Thursday, Oct. 5, and travels to New Mexico on Thursday, Oct. 19. BYU plays at TCU on Thursday, Sept. 28, and hosts Wyoming on Thursday, Nov. 5.

(A start-after-dark home game in November — that's great news for Cougar fans, isn't it?)

CSTV made it clear up front, however, that while it wouldn't ask MWC teams to play on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, it was looking at Thursday and Friday. There is, however, only one Friday game on the league's slate (Air Force at UNLV on Nov. 24 — the day after Thanksgiving).

And none of the league's teams is overburdened with Thursday-night games — BYU, Utah and TCU each have two; Air Force, Colorado State, New Mexico San Diego State and Wyoming have one apiece; UNLV has none. And nobody has more than one home game on a Thursday night.

Of course, these days it's hard to argue that Thursday night football games are non-traditional. There isn't a player on any college football team who's old enough to remember when there weren't games being played on Thursday nights.

BY THE WAY, if your cable provider doesn't include CSTV in its lineup, you might want to start calling and bugging the company right away. If you don't have CSTV, you're going to miss a whole lot of Utah and BYU sports starting this fall.

(If your cable provider doesn't come through, CSTV is available on satellite TV providers DirecTV and Dish Network.)

As for those of you Cougar or Ute fans who don't subscribe to either cable or satellite, start being real nice to your neighbors who do.

I'M JUST SHOCKED about CBS, ESPN and Dick Vitale. Not that ESPN told CBS it couldn't borrow Vitale for the NCAA tournament but that CBS asked.

There are few things that could make me avoid watching the NCAA tourney. But having to listen to Vitale shout might be one of them.

SPEAKING OF ESPN — or, more specifically, ESPN2 — it's hard to believe that the network will go ahead with its planned Barry Bonds-chases-Hank Aaron's-homerun-record reality show.

On the other hand, Bravo put Bobby Brown in a reality show, so why not ESPN2 and Barry Bonds?

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com