ESPN Pays Up For College Sports Rights Consolidation

Last summer, we wrote about ESPN’s college sports consolidation play and how Texas and Oklahoma moving from the Big 12 to the SEC could help the network keep more premium college football inventory away from rival Fox – while paying less for it.

Well a little over a year later, ESPN is still consolidating college sports, but is paying a lot more to make that happen.

We still don’t know what a 16-team SEC will earn from ESPN in its revised deal, but you can bet it will be a lot more than the $300 million-ish annually the sides agreed to back in December 2020. That was before Texas and Oklahoma joined the league, and also before the Big Ten’s monster three-network deal promised it at least $1 billion per year. Having just one media partner means the SEC will fall short of that mark, but without any knowledge of negotiations, it’s safe to assume that $300 million figure could easily be doubled given current market conditions around live sports.

Along with paying significantly more for SEC rights, ESPN will also pay more for the new-look Big 12’s rights, according to weekend reports. A six-year deal starting in 2025 will net the Big 12 about $380 million per year – despite the loss of Texas and Oklahoma. To replace those two founding members, the Big 12 added Brigham Young, Central Florida, Cincinnati and Houston last year, effective starting next summer.

ESPN won’t foot the entire bill for those Big 12 rights, which will once again be split with Fox. But notably, the network has the “A” package as Sports Business Journal puts it, giving it first dibs on most of the best football inventory each season (including the first four football selections). It also gets the championship games for football and men’s basketball. Fox gets plenty out of this, too. Yet, it’s clear that the premier Big 12 events will all live on ESPN to a greater extent than they do now (especially with tier three rights retained as well to boost ESPN+ inventory).

As Matt Brown highlights on Extra Points, the Big 12 moving some of its men’s basketball inventory to Fox and FS1 also could create a ripple effect of crowding out the Big East. That league has been with Fox since breaking away from football members back in 2013, and has only needed to share space with the Big Ten.

More Big Ten basketball games on Fox, plus the addition of Big 12 games suddenly makes it harder for the Big East to get the same regular season attention as before. With the Big East’s agreement with Fox expiring soon, Brown wonders if Fox will even pay a high premium for Big East rights given increased competition, especially since the league doesn’t have football games (the most valuable inventory).

Among those waiting in the wings to make an offer to the Big East could be… long-time former partner ESPN. NBC and CBS are out there too, of course. But if the Big East were to return to ESPN, it would show even further college sports consolidation for the network.

That’s before even considering the ACC (locked in with ESPN through 2036 on a steal of a contract at this point), and the Pac-12, which seems more likely to park part of its rights on ESPN than Fox. The rest potentially sit with Amazon or CBS. But ESPN would still likely have the top inventory there as well.

Again, ESPN’s going to wind up paying a significant amount for the consolidation of college sports under its umbrella. But when you’re so reliant on cable subscribers and TV advertising from live sporting events, it’s sort of your best chance to stay necessary for audiences.

In the process, ESPN can basically put Fox on an island with the Big Ten and the lesser half of the Big 12 rights, and… that’s basically it from a college sports perspective (aside from a smattering of Mountain West games). For Fox, it’s not nothing. But it’s also a fairly limited scope compared to what ESPN could potentially boast: Full ACC and SEC rights, and the most advantageous parts of Big East, Big 12 and Pac-12 rights. 

That’s more than it can say right now, and unlike Fox, ESPN also has the streaming infrastructure to lend real support to overflow.

For all of the headlines about ESPN being a millstone for Disney given recent TV conditions, college sports seems to be its roadmap toward continued relevance, be it on linear or streaming.