College Sports Consolidation Is Now Just A Battle For Best TV Inventory
Late last week, a major college conference was effectively wiped off the map. For TV.
The Pac-12, which has been the West Coast’s premier conference for over 100 years, lost founding schools Oregon and Washington to the Big Ten, knocking its 2024 membership down to seven schools. Arizona, Arizona State and Utah were announced as Big 12 members within hours. And by the weekend, there were just four Pac-12 members remaining, with California, Oregon State, Stanford and Washington State.
The Pac-12’s end isn’t the first time a college conference has been gutted by realignment and consolidation. But being the West Coast’s top league, you could argue it’s the most important one to suffer that fate. And the first to find itself gutted entirely due to machinations around television inventory.
As many others have covered in far better detail than I could: It didn’t have to be this way. And now, college football — long the NFL’s lovingly flawed regional cousin — is on the doorstep of being a national TV product in a way that fundamentally changes it forever. If that sounds hyperbolic, I’d point out that it’s a common refrain among those that have covered college sports (self included) for a living.
When the 2024 season starts, the sport will have at least three conferences of 16 or more teams, no major league on the West Coast and games largely confined to Fox-owned and Disney-owned networks. It’ll effectively be a lesser NFL. Fox/Fox Sports 1 and ESPN/ABC will have competing windows all day for their gaggle of teams. And if there’s further consolidation (and there may be), some of that talk is being led by how the ACC uses the remaining scraps of the Pac-12 to create a competing late-night window with Fox’s USC/UCLA/Oregon/Washington block in the Big Ten.
The Big Ten, of course, has been the lead aggressor in this consolidation push — potentially at the behest of media partner Fox. It’s also the biggest earner in this nationalization of the sport, as the Big Ten’s billion-dollar TV deal signed last summer created an NFL-style TV schedule with early, afternoon and primetime kickoff windows on Saturdays across Fox, CBS and NBC. Adding Oregon and Washington will likely push the Big Ten closer to $8 billion in total media rights payouts over seven years. While Fox isn’t the only partner, it’s by far the league’s most significant and as such, is a direct beneficiary of the league’s continued growth and popularity on a national scale.
Given Fox’s keen emphasis on football as a major source of audience attention and advertiser focus on the network (iSpot data shows that football-related programming delivered at least 43% of household TV ad impressions on big Fox alone in 2022), perhaps we should’ve expected this all along. Though ESPN’s significantly invested in football — and the largest media investor in college football — they’re at least a little more diversified than Fox given its contracts across college sports, NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL programming and more.
You could also argue ESPN’s own hands aren’t completely clean when it comes to college sports’ consolidation. ESPN has all of the ACC’s tier one rights, and that league raided the Big East’s football membership two separate times between 2003 and 2012. The SEC (also an ESPN-exclusive conference) has done its fair share of pilfering too, taking Texas A&M, Missouri, Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12 in the timeframe from 2010 to 2021.
Despite the seismic shifts to the future of the college football landscape, there’s another chance the reshuffling is far from over.
Between its share of the Big 12 TV deal, the Big Ten’s national reach, Big East basketball and a portion of the Mountain West’s rights (which it shares with CBS), Fox has much of the country covered beyond perhaps the Southeast. That — plus the state of Texas — is ESPN’s domain right now with the ACC and SEC locked in for the foreseeable future. ESPN’s share of the Big 12 deal gets it into the Mountain Time Zone, and some basketball rights are all they’ll have out West.
If Fox wants to destabilize ESPN’s inventory (i.e. its biggest conference partners), it could try to entice ACC teams in the Southeast to test that league’s “ironclad” grant of rights through 2036. Florida State has already expressed a need to leave the ACC soon due to its revenue disparities with the Big Ten and SEC. There’s also the matter of Notre Dame, whose independent football program has its own contract with NBC, but otherwise is a member of the ACC. As college sports’ largest national brand remaining, Notre Dame has long been a white whale for every conference. For Fox, finally attracting the Fighting Irish could be what helps tip over the apple cart around the ACC — which is ultimately what it wants for the Big Ten’s already supersized footprint.
You could argue ESPN’s options are a little less obvious. Signing off on an SEC raid of the ACC only costs the network money when parent company Disney doesn’t have as much to spend on content. That leaves Big 12 schools for the SEC, but if the conference didn’t add any of those member schools before, why bother now?
On the ACC side, there was a reality where it could’ve added many of the remaining Pac-12 schools after Colorado initially left for the Big 12 a couple weeks ago. While the logistics of a bicoastal conference (especially when the ACC will be paying half of what the Big Ten is) are not ideal, it would’ve been a move out of necessity for all parties. Now, the only way the ACC can expand without robbing directly from ESPN’s college football inventory is if they bring Cal and Stanford aboard. Any additions from the AAC or Big 12 (unlikely for now unless the Eastern teams are concerned over increased travel) would mean borrowing directly from ESPN’s own inventory.
As a long-time college sports fan and (previously) writer, I dread this new reality and what it means for the future of football in particular. As someone who regularly writes about TV now, though, I begrudgingly understand how we got here and why it’s a necessary evolution for the networks. That doesn’t mean I have to like it, though.
