What Fox can do with FS1 (and potentially FS2) and Fox Sports Go is pretty cool. You have a vehicle that can span from broadcast network television to regional cable that goes to the granular level of major league cities and then onto the net for spillover.
Let's look at a league like the Mountain West. If you assume that the Big 12, Pac-12, and C-USA stick with FOX (which they will for a long time), and they ultimately sign the MWC, you could do something like this...
In the weeks where the MWC has a big game, you could do what ABC does and have a window for selecting big games a couple weeks out. If Boise State has a big game against someone, maybe a big conference team in the non-con, you could put that game on FOX. Later in the year, if the game is big, you can put it on FS1 or FS2 if it doesn't necessarily have broadcast network appeal. For most MWC games, or C-USA games for that matter, you can use FSN to broadcast it to particular regions of the country where you can charge higher ad rates for that regionally relevant game. If someone is mad that you can't see it in your region, there's always Fox Sports Go, which you can stream on your iPad, laptop, iPhone or using your XBox 360, PS3, or Roku.
On an average Saturday, at the same time, on FSN channels in the Mountain and Pacific time zones, you could be watching San Diego State vs. Air Force while FSN in the Midwest would show Kansas vs. Iowa State. In the Florida, you could watch FAU vs. FIU on Sun Sports and SportSouth while Root Sports and other Northeastern Fox affiliates could show Tulsa at Marshall. If you're a KU fan that's displaced in Arizona, and you aren't getting the game, you can log onto Fox Sports Go to see it.
Using the top-to-bottom mechanism, Fox can put spotlight games on the broadcast networks, really good games on FS1 and FS2, and then sell off crappy large conference games and smaller, mid-major conference games to regionally relevant audiences using FSN and Fox Sports Go. ESPN doesn't have the regional reach that Fox does to cultivate and profit on that kind of model.
It sounds like the Mountain West is going to sign a deal with ESPN soon, but it's really peanuts ($18 million a year divided by 12 schools). Eventually, when Fox gets this thing up and running, they could probably work a lot of these conferences profitably into their model.
