Media Rights Teleconference - March 27, 2019
Q. Navy has this separate deal with CBS Sports Network for all its home games. You're getting your pick of one of those. Did you want more? Why let Navy have whatever the remaining five or six home games it has? Did you push for more than just one home game, and if not, why do you feel just one choice of one of the Navy home games to move over to ESPN from CBS Network is sufficient?
MIKE ARESCO: We discussed this with ESPN, and Navy has unique scheduling requirements as a military academy. You're well aware of their homecomings and they have to schedule games well in advance and can only do home games at certain times of the day, ESPN, as you know, is the major distributor of college football. So we looked at that, and it was a joint decision that there were certain things that ESPN probably wouldn't have been able to do or certainly those games would potentially have been in the package.
The relationship that Navy has with CBS Sports Network allows them a lot of flexibility, and so therefore that was why that deal was done.
ESPN is happy to have that home game because they are able to schedule that one premier home game each year, and that's going to be great. In addition, they get the Navy away games in our conference. There's much more scheduling flexibility with those games.
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Your agreements are a demonstration of your values. The AAC cared about Navy's unique FB deal with CBSSN. The AAC did not care about UConn's unique deal with SNY. Simple as.