San Diego State coach Steve Fisher is hoping a move to the Big West will help elevate the entire league.

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With 11 NCAA tournament bids in the last three seasons, and at least three more looking very likely this upcoming year, Mountain West men's basketball is at its competitive apex. There is significant talent spread across the league, extremely well-regarded head coaches at many of the programs, and some of the loudest, toughest homecourt environments in the country. The product is undeniably good.

In theory, the rise (and presumed staying power) of MWC hoops should be a valuable asset for a conference reexamining its broadcast rights in light of the shuttering of the conference's The Mtn. Network this past spring. But when asked about the value of basketball in ever-changing broadcast rights negotiations, league commissioner Craig Thompson made a sobering and salient point.

"I think the greatest example a couple summers ago was Kansas," Thompson said, noting how at one point, the Jayhawks looked like they were going to get squeezed out of the realignment picture when a Pac-16 and a defunct Big 12 appeared possible. "... Really, Kansas basketball was arguably not an issue in anyone's mind."

If no one values Kansas basketball as a piece of this ongoing national shell game, then you can forget about UNLV, San Diego State or New Mexico moving network needles. It's a football-driven world, which explains pretty much everything that's gone on the last couple of years in the Mountain West, and what's still to come as the reinforced league continues to try to find its footing.

Given the shortcomings that helped lead to The Mtn.'s demise -- very limited distribution outside of a premium tier on DirecTV, no high-definition broadcasts for basketball outside of the conference tournament -- it's easy to forget that it was the first conference-specific TV network. The league, tired of what it considered second-class treatment from ESPN in terms of broadcast times and dates, struck out on its own in a precursor to networks that are now printing sheaths of money for the Big Ten and Pac-12. Six years after the launch of The Mtn., the concept clearly has been validated, but the football product in the Mountain West was never good enough or stable enough or in markets large enough to make other vendors want to pay for distribution or for the BCS to fully let the MWC into the party.

So, faced with earning around $1 million a year from Mountain West rights, schools like BYU, Utah, TCU, Boise State and San Diego State all made financially prudent (if, in some cases, geographically curious) decisions. Most are grabbing many times that from a BCS conference while BYU elected to go independent and control its own product with its own TV network that has five times the distribution (65 million homes) The Mtn. was able to claim. It's hard to blame any of them for the moves, but the result is, as the Mountain West continues to try to shore up its football side, a really good basketball league dangles a bit in the wind.

Perhaps it's positive spin on a move forced upon him by administrators trying to offset massive budget cuts in the California state school system, but San Diego State head coach Steve Fisher actually seems enthusiastic about his program's looming move to the heretofore low-prestige Big West starting in 2013-14. His Aztecs, who are loaded this season and also likely will bring a ranked team into the Big West next year, are set to become the latest program attempting to thrive with a Gonzaga/Memphis model: Load up for bear in nonconference play and try to use your program to elevate the rest of the league closer to your level. But for Fisher, the potential for better TV exposure could be the biggest plus to switching leagues. Not coincidentally, the Big West has a broadcast deal with ESPN.

"What is going to happen [next year], we're going to have a much more impactful TV schedule when we're not burdened with what we've had to deal with since we went away from ESPN. It's been an albatross on everybody," Fisher said last week. "First, [it will help] internally, administratively, financially, then exposure-wise, people would laugh and say [San Diego State's] in the witness protection program because no one could see you. We could not have a nonconference home game on ESPN. That will all change dramatically for the better, so we're already ratcheting up our nonconference schedule to fit what we're going to be."

Original post:
Andy Glockner: Mountain West hoops success hasn't translated into broadcast gold