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The Big Ten Conference unveiled media rights deals Thursday that are expected to be worth more than $1 billion annually, a monumental windfall that comes amid a rapidly changing landscape of conference-hosting schools and athletes who defend a larger share of the growing wealth flowing through athletic departments. The deals, with Fox, CBS and NBC, are the largest in college sports history.
Once synonymous with the Midwest, the Big Ten will soon have 16 teams spread from New Jersey to California, a fledgling national conference in a sports arena once prized for its regional appeal. The conference recently announced the planned additions of USC and UCLA, which will give the conference a foothold in the lucrative Los Angeles media market and increased the value of the deals.
Kevin Warren, the conference’s commissioner since 2020, said this summer that he had been thinking about Big Ten expansion since he was interviewed for the job. Warren incorporated the idea of expansion, if not specific schools, into the first term sheets discussed with the networks, he said.
“The expansion that it did for us and for our fans, it really narrowed the United States, it narrowed our country,” Warren said in an interview, “as far as people recognizing that they’re going to be able to see our teams compete and their schools compete morning. , noon and night and at unique times of the year, like Black Friday, and coast to coast”.
The 16 members of the Big Ten, including previous additions Maryland and Rutgers, will be the recipients of the fundraising, as television money is the biggest source of revenue for college sports. The conference’s chief rival, the SEC, has made its own moves, announcing last year that it would add Texas and Oklahoma.
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“The ability of the Big Ten and the SEC to generate television revenue has attracted big names like USC and Texas to these conferences in a way that wouldn’t make sense without all that television money,” the economist said Andy Schwarz, who has participated. in several lawsuits against the NCAA. “It also makes it clear that they run a football team like a business, and in doing so, they treat their players like NFL players.”
The tradition-shattering moves and the onslaught of TV money come as the NCAA has faced litigation and legislation across the country challenging its longstanding fan rules. Last year, the association loosened some of those restrictions to allow athletes to earn money from endorsements and their social media accounts, but there is no revenue-sharing model for the huge television contracts. Warren said he’s open to having a conversation with the players about it.
“All these open issues need to be put on the table for legitimate discussion,” he said.
The new deals, which begin in 2023 and run for seven years, illustrate the staggering amount of money filling the coffers of college athletic programs, an evolution that can be traced through the Big Ten. In 1996, the conference landed what was then a record deal: a 10-year, $100 million deal with ESPN that put nearly all of its conference games on the network. In 2007, the conference launched the Big Ten Network in partnership with Fox in a deal that netted $2.8 billion over 20 years. The Pac-12, ACC and SEC have all followed the Big Ten and launched their own branded networks, with varying degrees of success.
The Big Ten and SEC remain well ahead of rival conferences in revenue. The SEC signed a deal with ESPN worth $3 billion over 10 years, according to the Sports Business Journal, for its biggest Saturday game starting in 2024. (Other parts of that deal make the value of SEC media rights to about $700 million each year .) But the Big Ten is now back on top.
The new deals will give the conference an NFL-like schedule spread over three broadcast networks on college football Saturdays, with set windows for each: noon on Fox; 3:30 p.m. on CBS; and prime time on NBC. Notably left out of the deal is ESPN, which has been a Big Ten partner for four decades. Even in a more fragmented media environment, ESPN remains the dominant sports network in the country. Its daily talk programming drives the sports talk of the day and retains rights to the College Football Playoff. ESPN, for decades, was key to putting the Big Ten on television across the country.
“We are a key component of college athletics, and especially college football,” Warren said. “Everyone recognizes that it is important that we all work together and that we all have a collaborative voice. I am confident that where we stand in the Big Ten, we will be able to have a voice in shaping the future of college athletics both on and off the playing field.”
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The Big Ten is just the latest sports property to pick up a windfall, proving once again the value of live sports to media companies, both traditional and new. The NFL signed a deal with the four broadcast networks and Amazon last year that will pay it about $100 billion over a decade. Major League Baseball’s new deal with Fox Sports is worth more than $5 billion annually. Last year, the English Premier League doubled the annual value of its US rights share when it re-signed with NBC for $2.7 billion over six years. Live sports remain key to retaining cable customers, while streaming platforms hope to use them to recruit new subscribers. (The Big Ten also had talks with Amazon.)
Other Big Ten sports, including men’s and women’s basketball, will air on Fox (and FS1), CBS and NBC, along with the Big Ten Network, in which Fox owns 61%, and Peacock, the service of NBC broadcast. Fox and FS1 will continue to show a large portion of the conference’s football games.
In 2023, CBS will broadcast seven football games. The network is still tied to the SEC through a contract that requires the conference’s top game to be broadcast exclusively by CBS at 3:30 p.m. Beginning in 2024, the Big Ten will occupy this afternoon window for the entire season.
NBC will air 14 to 16 football games each season, introducing programming described as “Big Ten Saturday Night,” an effort to mirror the network’s success with “Sunday Night Football.” These three major networks will share the rights to broadcast the Big Ten football title game, with Fox televising the game in 2023, 2025, 2027 and 2029, and CBS (2024, 2028) and NBC (2026) televising the main event in the other years.
CBS will televise the championship game of both the men’s and women’s basketball conference tournaments.