Courtesy Idaho Statesman

(January 5, 2010) The radio broadcast rights for Boise State football and basketball moved last week from Peak Broadcasting (KIDO 580 AM) to Citadel Broadcasting (KBOI 670 AM and KKGL 96.9 FM). The deal was brokered by Learfield Sports, which has helped to form Bronco Sports Programming to oversee sponsorship and multimedia rights for Bronco athletics.

The change starts with the 2010 football season.

Kevin Godwin, the senior vice-president of Peak Broadcasting, issued a public statement Tuesday that addresses the change, including a potential station switch for Boise State play-by-play announcer Bob Behler:

"For the first time ever, a third party sports marketing company purchased the rights to Boise State Bronco Athletics beginning with the 2010-2011 football season. Learfield Sports proposed a new and dramatically different radio rights agreement that would have cost us more than our current agreement with Boise State and provided us with no opportunity to recover that investment.

"Learfield asked for more than 500 hours of inventory on 580/63 KIDO and a FM station, they also asked us to pay for the majority of the broadcast team’s compensation and pay Learfield Sports a cash fee. Basically, we would be giving up a combination of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and inventory for the privilege to run Broncos Football, Men’s & Women’s Basketball games with no way to recoup any of that investment. Most importantly, this proposal eliminated the opportunity for the radio partner to sell ANY gameday broadcast inventory. Why would any radio company do a deal like that?

"Any radio company that committed that amount of resources without any chance to get a return on that investment will most likely have to make significant adjustments in terms of advertising rates and staff. Peak refuses to cut staff, compromise the quality of our six stations or raise advertising prices for our customers in order to run thirteen football games and Men’s and Women’s Basketball games. We value our brands, our employees who have built those brands and our customers who need exceptional value for the advertising dollars they spend. If we would have entertained this bid and won it, our staff, our advertisers, and our listeners would lose.

"We enjoy our current agreement that we have directly with Boise State and look forward to our broadcast of the Fiesta Bowl in January on 580 KIDO, all of our opportunities leading up to the big game, our continuing support of providing quality Bronco Tuesday Coaches Show broadcasts and of course, Men’s & Women’s Basketball game broadcasts. We are moving forward with investments in products and partnerships that generate a return for Peak Broadcasting and for our advertisers. We will continue to cover Boise State Athletics and provide our listeners with outstanding BSU content, as well as multi-team coverage; so that our advertisers can continue to reach all sports fans the Treasure Valley. We will provide our advertisers with valuable and reasonably priced local sponsorships for all those products.

"In regards to the Voice of the Broncos, Bob Behler is a Peak Broadcasting employee under contract until July 2010 and any mention of his future employment outside of Peak Broadcasting is premature.''

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