Reported UCLA, USC Plan To Join Big Ten Resets College Sports TV Rights
With TV rights climbing for live sports, it makes sense that the two richest college conferences — the Southeastern Conference and Big Ten — would try to cash in. The SEC took a big swing by inviting Texas and Oklahoma last fall to expand to 16 members. Now, the Big Ten appears to be in the process of adding UCLA and USC according to a report from the Mercury News’ Jon Wilner on Thursday.
I’ll say right off the bat that potentially adding the Pac-12’s most valuable brand names not only provides a huge boost to the Big Ten, but it likely sets off a mad expansion scramble in college sports that blows up the current paradigms and conference memberships. “Superconferences” of 16-plus teams have long been thought of as the eventual conclusion of rapid league expansion set off in 2010. Now it appears we’re about to reach that point where every college conference has no choice but to add teams to survive, regardless of whether they make sense within current geographic or cultural footprints.
All of that means we’re far from done with reshuffling the deck chairs in college sports. Insiders predict the Big Ten and SEC will wind up with 20 more schools apiece after a series of potential moves that could completely destroy conferences like the Pac-12, Big 12 and ACC, depending on where those additions come from. While there are plenty of repercussions beyond TV there, we’ll focus on how all of this impacts TV, piece by piece:
Fox Banking on Big Ten
Fox is already a Big Ten broadcast partner and part-owner of the Big Ten Network. It needed to bolster its fall football inventory in the wake of Texas and Oklahoma — the Big 12’s biggest audience draws — fleeing for the SEC (which will have all games on Disney-owned channels). While Fox is also a partner of the Pac-12, those games are split with ESPN and are typically air too late to draw the same viewership as Big Ten’s games. As a result, it devalues USC and UCLA games as events of national interest.
Now, one can assume that this is why the Big Ten’s new TV deal details were delayed. It could leave ESPN and go all-in with Fox, taking home even more than the rumored $1 billion per year for rights with a 16-team league. And who knows how much higher that figure could climb if the Big Ten grows to 20 or more members when the dust settles.
Fox doesn’t even have to walk away from its Pac-12 or Big 12 rights splits. But who knows how much longer those leagues will be around. If they survive, Fox will have more inventory for less (given the evaluation of those conferences) and the Big Ten will be more valuable than ever.
ESPN, SEC Adjustments
To some extent, ESPN was probably envisioning for some time that Fox would win Big Ten rights in full, so they’ve been planning for a life without those fan bases, the popular noon kickoffs and more. We were already waiting to hear how much more the SEC exclusivity deal would be worth once Texas and Oklahoma joined the fold. Now, it may be even longer as the conference could just keep adding teams. The value of SEC rights also goes up automatically at this point, given what the Big Ten seems projected to get from Fox.
The SEC’s new deal with ESPN was set at $300 million per year. That’s a discount, at this point, if the Big Ten can swing $1 billion or more per. Which means there’s going to have to be right-sizing to the market. A lot of that also depends on how much of a market is left because…
Which Conferences Will Still Be Around?
That question is probably even more important for ESPN than it is for Fox. Because while there are advantages to centralized college football “brands” for each network to sell to both viewers and advertisers, they do still have existing deals with other leagues large and small, and that inventory can’t just be completely deprioritized.
As mentioned, Fox can go all-in on the Big Ten, and if they want to pay lesser rates for partial corpses of the Big 12 and Pac-12 to fill space, that’s within the realm of possibility. But they can honestly just lean all the way into the Big Ten, give the league’s 16, 18, 20 or whatever teams more national exposure and just call it a day.
For ESPN, they have a long-term deal with the ACC (and a whole conference network) that is bound to be impacted by this one way or another. The ACC could add teams to keep up and ask for more money as a result of the increased inventory. Or in a much more likely scenario, the conference loses teams to the Big Ten and/or SEC because the ACC simply can’t keep up with the media rights deals those two leagues are commanding — at rates close to double what the ACC’s taking in per school right now.
ESPN also gets hit again by diminished/removed Pac-12 and Big 12 products. Like Fox, they can pay less to continue those partial arrangements. However, ESPN also needs those games more than Fox, which has other options as a broadcast network that’s not sports exclusive. If ESPN has holes in its fall Saturday schedule, that’s not a tenable situation at all. So the network fills those gaps with diminished versions of the current major conferences (if they even exist) — while probably overpaying to do so. Or it could try to elevate current “lesser” leagues in the hope of catching lightning in a bottle (as they have in the past with the Mid-American Conference and #MACtion, or late-night Boise State games).
Lesser conferences getting poached is no guarantee just yet, since this feels like a two- or three-conference consolidation play more than anything else. And none of the teams outside of the top 69 schools (current ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC teams plus Notre Dame and the four inbound Big 12 expansions chools) is all that appealing for national audiences. But if it happens, CBS gets hit here too. NBC has the Notre Dame deal, but only until 2025. If the Fighting Irish finally joins a league as a result of all of this, there goes that inventory as well as it would certainly be owned by the new conference TV partner.
There is plenty more that still needs sorting out, which may take years. But it certainly seems like college sports is about to look unrecognizable, with the biggest conferences completely taking the wheel and daring the rest to do something about it.
That may mean the top 40 to 64 programs finally break away from the NCAA to do their own very lucrative thing that’s worth even more to (and costs even more for) networks and streaming partners. But no matter what, we’re about to see a very different landscape that tests the entire ecosystem’s wallets, from networks and conferences, to school and fans.
