Deal's nice, but fans might hold grudge

Now that The mtn. actually has a deal with DirecTV — signed, sealed and delivered — all is forgiven, right?

Absolutely not.

Millions of Mountain West Conference fans will go two years without any access to their teams on TV. The mtn. is currently available in barely 1 percent of the TV-equipped homes in America. The MWC has got to expect that ill feelings are going to linger for more than a little while.

There was certainly no ill intent on the part of anyone at the MWC or its member institutions. The fact remains that ESPN was offering half as much money and horrendous time slots, and fans need to keep that in mind.

Over the past two years, it's become apparent that the league was more than a bit naive about television. But naivete is an explanation, it isn't an excuse.

SAN DIEGO STATE ought to fire its athletic director.

Jeff Schemmel announced that the MWC had a deal with DirecTV before the deal had been signed. Which was not only foolish — reportedly, the league has been close to a deal several times since September 2006 — but Schemmel put the league at a decided disadvantage.

His announcement put huge pressure on the league — already under enormous pressure from fans — to close the deal. And, potentially, put DirecTV in a position to demand last-minute changes.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Kudos to the folks at BYU and Utah for keeping their mouths shut.

LET'S NOT GET carried away with this deal. DirecTV has 16.8 million subscribers, about 15 percent of the total TV households in America.

That's a huge improvement over the 1.2 million The mtn. has now, but it's not exactly wide distribution.

But now, if you're a Utah or BYU fan anywhere in America, you can sign up for DirecTV and watch your team. Actually, that's great news.

IT WILL COST YOU to watch BYU and Utah. We don't have details yet, but you can figure The mtn. won't be part of DirecTV's lowest-priced package.

And, at the risk of ticking some people off, you'll just have to get over it. It's going to be too expensive for some. It's going to be a pain for some people to switch to DirecTV.

But you don't get into games at Edwards or Rice-Eccles Stadium for free, either.

As we've discussed here many times before, more and more sports programming has migrated to cable. That's not going to change.

WITH GREATER DISTRIBUTION comes great responsibility, perhaps. And The mtn. has got to do something to upgrade the quality of its telecasts.

HD would be nice. So would production quality and camera work that rises above the level of what we've come to expect from the channel.

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com