Some fans who can cite the University of Hawaii quarterback depth chart three and four deep are left puzzled by where to find the Rainbow Warriors’ football games on TV this season.

For openers, mention that the UH game against Southern California on Thursday is on the CBS Sports Network and the initial assumption of many is that it’s on KGMB, the local CBS network affiliate.

Instead, the game is scheduled on the CBS-owned 24-hour sports cable outlet, the CBS Sports Network (CBSSN), formerly known as CSTV and CBS College Sports (Oceanic Time Warner Cable channels 247/1247 and Hawaiian Telcom 83/1083).

"I totally get the confusion," said John McNamara, UH associate athletic director for marketing, citing the changes in the marketplace over the past two years.

The difference is huge. CBS is available in approximately 115 million households nationally, while CBSSN is said to reach approximately 50 million. By comparison, ESPN reaches 100 million.

CBSSN, which will show 23 Mountain West Conference football games, also holds rights to Army, Navy, the Patriot League and some Conference-USA and American Conference (formerly Big East) games. Noncollege properties include lacrosse, pro bull riding and bowling.

For the 2013 season, UH’s 12 games will be spread over three outlets: four on CBSSN, one on the Pac-12 Network and seven on Oceanic and Hawaiian Telcom’s pay-per-view packages.

"So, it can get confusing," McNamara said.

UH’s second game of the season, Sept. 7 at Oregon State, is scheduled for the year-old Pac-12 Network, a subsidiary of the Pac-12 Conference. A network spokesman in San Francisco said the local channels will be DISH 413, Hawaiian Telcom 31/1031 and Oceanic Time Warner 232/1232.

Once upon a time, McNamara said, "it was a lot easier when there were only two (levels) of telecasts, the first-tier networks and the local stations."

As such, if a UH game wasn’t on KFVE/Oceanic, fans knew they could probably find it on ESPN, the primary rights holder for the Western Athletic Conference between 1985 and 2011. UH appeared on ESPN every year between 2001 and 2012 and every year but one between 1995 and 2012, sometimes as many as five times a season.

But with conferences brokering TV deals beyond one primary rights holder, games have become spread across several so-called "tiers."

For UH, the changes were compounded by the move to the Mountain West last year. The MWC spread its rights among three networks — ESPN, CBSSN and NBC Sports Network (formerly Versus), which is owned by NBC and reaches 80 million homes. Add in an appearance on Fox in a road game under the Pac-12 Conference contract and local pay-per-view and the Warriors were fragmented across five entities in 2012.

When the MWC began trying to woo Boise State away from a planned move to the Big East last year, it re-wrote its TV deals to allow ESPN to cherry-pick Broncos home games.

ESPN says it will show 450 college football games this season across its various platforms (ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, etc.). But barring a late-season adjustment, it will be the first time UH does not appear on ESPN in 13 years.

"Unless," McNamara points out, "we’re in the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl (which is owned, operated and shown by ESPN)."