popular in a geographical area or at least located in a big geographical area. The "carriage fee" model means the cable providers in an area pay a fee per household, regardless of whether or not anyone in the area actually watches, in order to carry the network and offer it to subscribers at all.

In that model you want to give cable providers in certain regions a motivation to carry your channel, and the bigger the metro, the better, since bigger metros = more cable households = more households paying a carriage fee. This is why the B1G added Rutgers.

Today that model is mostly antiquated. It isn't about getting cable to carry your channel-- cable systems are dropping like flies and losing subscribers and carriage fees increase the cost of offering their product without (unless there are actually interesting games on them) increasing its attractiveness. It is about getting marquee matchups that people want to watch.

Having said that, I can see adding SDSU in an effort to keep whatever local providers in SoCal are still carrying the P12 network, I guess. But I don't think it would work, because as it turns out, demand for a channel = demand to watch the football games on that channel. SDSU doesn't have enough fans (as far as I know) to motivate people to choose a different cable provider. I don't know but I'm going to guess that Dallas cable providers aren't suddenly going to carry the P12 network just because SMU is on it, either. SMU has a lot of alumni in Texas, but I don't think very many would choose their cable provider based on it. IDK.

I could of course be wrong.