“It’s raised our profile”

SPOKANE – Growth in the conference’s television coverage, playoff seeding, the transfer portal and name, image and likeness were all part of Big Sky Commissioner Tom Wistrcill’s State of the Conference Address on Monday in Spokane, going over the previous year in the Big Sky as well as looking at the future.

“It’s raised our profile,” Wistrcill said of the growth in media coverage. “People out east and in the midwest – they know about the Big Sky Conference, but I think what it showed to them is that we are a premier conference in FCS football and how big-time it is to be a part of Big Sky – the conference and certainly our football programs.”

Last May the Big Sky Conference announced a deal with Scripps television stations, which allows fans to watch football and men’s and women’s basketball games on local television channels. The move expanded the conference’s reach on top of its prior deal with ESPN.

“What that provides is linear options, home and away, for our teams in their local market,” Wistrcill said. “Fans can go on ESPN+, they can go on their local Scripps station and watch our games. To us, it’s all about exposing more and more people with a broad reach to Big Sky football.”

Though ESPN made high-profile layoffs last month as the result of budget cuts, Wistrcill said he feels “really solid” about the Big Sky’s relationship with ESPN, citing geography reasons and providing content to fill the late-hour slots on both ESPN’s linear channels and ESPN+.

“What we provide for them is great programming in the western part of the United States,” Wistrcill said. “We’ve proven that we can drive an audience; some of our TV ratings that came back from football games on Saturday, we’ve had better ratings than Conference USA, Sun Belt, and the American at times.”

With the addition of NIL into the atmosphere of collegiate athletics, combined with more and more athletes putting their names into the transfer portal, conferences from around the nation have been met with new challenges over the past few years. Wistrcill said that there are both positive and negative effects from NIL and the transfer portal in the Big Sky.

“In some ways, in some of our sports, our best student-athletes who have eligibility left – they’re just going to leave,” Wistrcill said. “NIL and transfer portal all happening at the same time just made it different. They could not only go and play at what they perceived to be a higher level, but now they can get money there too. That was never the case before.”

There have been benefits, though.

“We’ve also had a number of really good transfers come into our programs from FBS and other programs, so we can’t sit here and say ‘It’s been damaging for college athletics,’ because we’re benefitting from it,” Wistrcill said. “Our programs have really worked hard to get those types of players.”

Another topic discussed was the FCS playoff structure, where the top eight teams receive seeds and the other 16 team’s matchups are determined regionally. Wistrcill shared the idea of seeding up to 16 teams in the playoffs.

“Instead of saying (seed the) top eight and looking at geography, it’s a true tournament,” Wistrcill said. “We believe that ninth best team, tenth best team and as it goes down, they should have advantages that the 16th team doesn’t – right now they don’t.”

The 2022 football season was also the first time that ESPN’s College Gameday traveled to a Big Sky school, with the show making an appearance in Bozeman, Montana in November the 121st matchup of the Brawl of the Wild between Montana and Montana State. While the accomplishment of having College GameDay come to the Big Sky was “exciting,” the objective now moves to having the show come back in the future.

“It was a great day, and it was everything it was built up to be,” Wistrcill said. “Now, our goal is to get it back, so we’ll be working hard to try to bring College GameDay (back). What we showed to them was two things; we can build a great audience, and their equipment can work in minus-five-degree temperatures.”

Ian Bivona may be reached at ibivona@columbiabasinherald.com.