B1G Implications: What’s Next For Networks After Big Ten’s Record TV Rights Deal
Even before UCLA and USC opted to leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten, the upcoming Big Ten media rights deal was going to be historically lucrative. With the Bruins and Trojans (who lock down the Los Angeles market for the Midwest-based college sports league) in the fold starting in 2023-24, the conference announced a new deal on Thursday worth between $7 and $8 billion over the course of seven years. That’s the largest a college conference has ever received.
The group of TV partners included — CBS, Fox and NBC — is notable not just for its three-way split, but the fact that ESPN isn’t included there. Within the last week or so, cable’s top sports network bowed out of bidding to continue airing the conference’s games, as it has each year since 1982. Such a move will have major ramifications for ESPN, obviously. But also the networks that managed to secure Big Ten rights.
Below, we look at what we know about the networks involved, and what’s next:
Fox
Along with ESPN, Fox has been the B1G’s other long-time media rights partner. The Big Ten Network cable channel is a joint venture between the league and Fox, which owns 61% of it. And Fox currently holds about 50% of the Big Ten’s rights which it splits with ESPN (CBS also gets some men’s college basketball inventory).
Fox has been a big part of the Big Ten becoming the best-compensated college sport conference in the country, even if the SEC has found more successful on the football field these past two decades. The network’s most recent deal, which expires after the 2022-23 athletic season wraps up, saw it combine with ESPN to pay the league $430 million per year.
Under the new deal — which likely sees Fox paying over $700 million per year for the rights of the expanded 16-team league — Fox would take over ESPN’s early-afternoon Saturday kickoff slots and some of the biggest games with it. As the Big 12 and Pac-12 have become less lucrative properties given departures over the last year (UCLA and USC to the Big Ten, Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC), Fox could either re-sign the diminished conferences to new (lesser) deals to fill out the rest of its inventory, or just go all-in on the Big Ten. The former idea probably makes more sense than the latter, given how the windows are handled in the new deal.
Big Ten Network
With 16 teams and a foothold in Los Angeles and the New York metro area (Rutgers), the Big Ten Network stands a much better chance to stay a part of base cable and satellite bundles, while also becoming a more enticing inclusion across various streaming packages. The network won’t get near the sort of carriage fees that have long buoyed ESPN (upwards of $7 per subscriber per month), but it stands to help Fox gain more leverage with MVPDs just the same, at a time when seemingly niche cable networks are getting dropped in efforts to slim down the cost for consumers.
The Big Ten Network already aired plenty of live games across football, men’s and women’s basketball and other sports. Bringing UCLA and USC’s vaunted Olympic sports programs into that collection, plus occasional football and basketball games, the inventory is more valuable than it was, for sure.
CBS
Starting in 2024, ESPN will be the exclusive home of the SEC, removing games from CBS, which long held a portion of those rights and based Saturday schedules around those marquee matchups. As a result, CBS had to make a move in this new round of college media rights negotiations, or else they’d completely lose fall Saturdays to competitors. Reports have the network paying around $350 million per year for the weekly mid-afternoon games that replace the previous SEC slot. Like Fox, that could possibly include options for cable games as well (Fox Sports 1 for Fox, CBS Sports Network for CBS), but the key advantage to this deal is just how much of it is broadcast-based.
Again, CBS pretty much had to do this. They lost the SEC, the ACC isn’t in play and Notre Dame is apparently resigning with NBC. The Big 12 and Pac-12 aren’t moving the needle in the same way given current memberships. So it was Big Ten or bust.
Still, $350 million is a big price tag for what may not even be as many games as CBS used to get with the SEC. And it’s significantly more than the $300 million per year ESPN’s paying for exclusivity on all things SEC… though that number is also going up for ESPN in light of Texas and Oklahoma joining that league by 2025.
NBC
Here’s where there’s relatively new inventory for a network. NBC wants to make the Big Ten “the NFL of college conferences,” and a weekly primetime slot in this new media rights setup would go a long way toward that. The network would reportedly pay a similar amount to CBS’s ~$350 million per year, and you could absolutely argue it would get a more premium product out of that spend than CBS does.
In the past, NBC’s place in the college football ecosystem was limited to Notre Dame games, allowing the sport’s collective audience to tune out entirely if the Fighting Irish were struggling on the field. Now, NBC gains a greater foothold in college football as a whole with the conference’s nationwide exposure, can host a variety of primetime matchups between Notre Dame home games and the Big Ten’s marquee dates, and become a bigger player in the wider culture of the sport inhabiting every Saturday from morning through the late evening.
NBC’s Sunday Night Football has been made into the crown jewel of the NFL’s weekly slate every fall. Without much effort, the network could do the same with Saturday Night Football and the national appeal of teams like Ohio State, Michigan, USC, and more in the Big Ten. Plus, it elevates the importance of Notre Dame’s games when they appear in primetime as well.
ESPN
ESPN’s recently efforted to both be more selective in the rights it holds — opting to pay more for fewer premium properties across various sports — while also expanding the scope of smaller niche rights to fill out ESPN+’s streaming inventory. As a result of the increased demand on the Big Ten, you wind up with ESPN not being willing to meet the asking price (at a time when activist investors are wondering if Disney should spin the network off in part due to the large sums of money it’s paying out for sports rights).
That will certainly leave a hole in the fall schedule for ESPN, which had established a lane for early Big Ten kickoffs as a staple of the weekly college football slate, and was in the mix for later afternoon and primetime games as well. Some of that space will already be filled by the SEC deal. And the departure of the Big Ten probably lends additional exposure to the ACC as well, since that league also has exclusivity with ESPN, needs more eyeballs on it, and now fills a void for ESPN without the B1G.
Additionally, ESPN leaving the Big Ten sweepstakes gives new life to the Big 12 and/or Pac-12, which are both due to negotiate new deals at what’s assumed will be lesser values than the previous contracts (both split between ESPN and Fox). Now that ESPN needs more games across ABC, ESPN and ESPN2, that means they’ll pay for the right to air the diminished leagues (which still feature their fair share of quality teams, even if lacking the biggest draws).
***
Even after this monumental deal, the dust is far from settled for college sports TV rights. The Big Ten may not even be done expanding, which would open the door for this deal to grow even more.
As mentioned, Notre Dame is still figuring out its new agreement with NBC, and Pac-12 and Big 12 rights are still in the early phases of negotiations. The ACC and SEC are also likely looking for a raise from ESPN to stay competitive with the B1G. While the SEC will assuredly get one since it has two more teams than it did when the contract was signed, the ACC is hoping for a good faith raise based largely on its long-term partnership with the network and future stability. Plus, the College Football Playoff could simply remove itself from the NCAA structure altogether, which creates an entirely new set of dominoes.
If nothing else, college sports has spent the last decade turning itself into year-round theater with increasing focus on off-the-field business decisions. That constant conference shuffling and TV rights negotiating needs to end at some point though, right?
