NBC Sports and CAA announce new five year TV deal

NBC and the Colonial Athletic Association have announced today a new five year deal that starts next season for broadcasting games.  The full press release is here, and it states that their will be at least 12 games shown nationally on the NBC Sports Network (formerly Versus) and 39 games will be shown regionally through CSN.  The CAA finals will no longer be on ESPN, which is an interesting move for the conference. Perhaps this means the date of the conference tournament might be moved, I always hated how early it was compared to others. It was early due to it being on ESPN so that could change for next year and hopefully the finals won't have to be on a Monday night anymore.

Overall I think the deal is good news but I'm guessing we won't see games on ESPNU and ESPN3 anymore. Games will still be on Comcast, which is great news for local area fans and the national coverage on NBC Sports Network could be a big lift for the conference. But aren't they losing a lot of viewers by ditching ESPN? ESPN's online distribution is growing and does the average fan even know channel NBC Sports Network is on their TV guide? Hopefully NBCSports.com will do a decent enough job streaming games and this could turn out to be something great for the conference. Also, CAA commissioner Tom Yeager said today that the conference will still participate in ESPN's Bracketbusters event. This deal is also only for CAA conference games, so MASN will still carry some of out of conference Mason games.

Here is the breakdown of outlets that will show Mason games starting 2012-2013:

-NBC Sports Network
-Comcast Sportsnet
-MASN
-ESPN-sponsored tournaments, also Bracketbusters
-NBC online

Not bad at all.

The main thing behind all this that the CAA currently only has eight national TV exposures and now they will have 12-18 which includes the semifinals and the finals of the CAA tournament.