The Big Ten’s new $7 billion media rights deal will connect the conference’s top football games across the three major networks each week, creating an NFL-style TV schedule on Tuesdays. Seven.
The Big Ten announced Thursday that it has reached a seven-year deal with Fox, CBS and NBC to share the rights to the conference’s football and basketball games.
The agreements go into effect in 2023, expire in 2030 and will eventually allow the 16 member universities that are about to become members of the conference to share more than $1 billion a year, a person familiar with the matter said. terms told the Associated Press.
The person spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because the Big Ten and network officials don’t publicly disclose financial details, but the deal is believed to be the richest ever on an annualized basis. with a college sports property. The big increase in conference revenue won’t begin until the third year of the agreement and will gradually increase over the final five years.
“I think what it does, it gives us the opportunity to make sure that we can continuously do what needs to be done to take care of our student-athletes, strengthen our institutions. me, building our programs,” Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren told the AP.
The Big Ten currently has 14 members, spanning from Rutgers and Maryland on the East Coast to Nebraska across the Midwest, and covering some of the largest media markets in the country, including New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.
In 2024, Southern California and UCLA are expected to join the Big Ten, adding the Los Angeles market in its place.
With ESPN dropping the Big Ten football equation after a 40-year relationship, the league is set to lock in three prominent periods with its network partners.
Fox, which has shared the rights to the Big Ten with ESPN since 2017 and owns a majority stake in the Big Ten Network, will continue to make noon Eastern time its main game of the day.
Fox and its cable network FS1 will have rights to more than two dozen football games, at least 45 men’s and women’s basketball games.
CBS, starting in 2024, will replace the Southeast Conference game of the week at 3:30 p.m. Eastern – which is transitioning to ABC – with the Big Ten game.
CBS will host 14-15 Big Ten football games each season from 2024-29, including a Black Friday game. Unlike its longtime agreement with the SEC, CBS will not be guaranteed a selection of the first football games each week with the Big Ten. Fox, CBS and NBC will host a draft for the games, allowing each network a number of chances to pick first in a given week.
In 2023, CBS will make seven Big Ten games while it still has the SEC on CBS at 3:30 p.m. Eastern. The network will continue to be the home ground of Big Ten men’s basketball, including the semifinals and finals of the conference tournament, and it will begin broadcasting the women’s basketball league championship.
“When we did the financial analysis and looked at the major markets – even before USC and UCLA – and the Big Ten’s national footprint, it was a very big deal,” said Sean McManus, President of CBS Sports. attractive to us,” said Sean McManus, president of CBS Sports. “And I think that’s a fair amount. It’s unprecedented. Those are the biggest deals in college football history.”
Starting in 2023, NBC will premiere “Big Ten Saturday Night” in prime time and air 15-16 games per season. The deal with NBC also includes eight football games and dozens of men’s and women’s basketball games each season to be streamed exclusively on Peacock, the network’s online subscription service. NBC also has a separate, permanent broadcast deal with Notre Dame, which remains unaffiliated with a conference.
Each network will air the Big Ten’s championship soccer game at least once for the duration of the deals, with Fox securing the rights to four (2023, ’25, ’27 and ’29).
Warren has spent more than two decades working as an executive at the main office of three NFL teams. He said the Big Ten’s vision for its new broadcasting deal is modeled after NFL Sunday, with three consecutive games on three different networks, airing from noon to nearly midnight Eastern time.
“I just think where we are in the Big Ten, we have a very unique opportunity because we have organizations that can do that,” Warren said. “We have the fanaticism. We have the breadth, we have the historical background, that we can really do something unique with the three mighty franchises Fox, CBS and NBC. .”
The Big Ten’s association with three traditional networks suggests that while streaming may be the future, linear television isn’t dead yet.
“It may be dying in some respects. You can say things like scripted TV series. Sitcom. But for sports and news, it’s never been stronger,” said the former Fox president. Sports Network Bob Thompson said.
He added: “Conferences or tournaments have a little bit of privacy to make a leap from the wide, wide distribution of broadcast channels. “Now that you’re going to move to a streaming service, in a grand scheme of things, the numbers are still relatively small in terms of how many people watch and use them.”
NBCUniversal is the parent company of NBC and CNBC.
