Topping $1 Billion a Year, Big Ten Signs Record TV Deal for College Conference
Topping $1 Billion a Year, With a yearly average of at least $1 billion, the Big Ten Conference has the largest broadcast arrangement of any college sporting organization.
The Big Ten’s status as one of the nation’s preeminent collegiate sports leagues is cemented by the seven-year agreement, which was unveiled on Thursday and is worth at least $7 billion over the length of the contract. It’s also going to make the already heated discussion about how universities should handle student-athletes who don’t get paid even hotter.
This arrangement comes during a time of unprecedented change in college sports, and it shows that television networks are eager to cash in on Americans’ voracious hunger for sporting events.
In 2021, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that made the college sports sector more susceptible to antitrust claims. Additionally, the declining political clout of collegiate sports has given athletes the confidence to speak out against long-standing laws, such as those that prevented them from profiting from their popularity until just last year.
However, elite leagues are still flush with cash, and there has been open discussion about whether athletes should receive a share, with Michigan’s football coach Jim Harbaugh joining in only last month. Despite calls for conferences to treat players like employees, they have taken no such action.
Networks
Now, unconcerned with the possibility of a windfall bringing additional pressure, the Big Ten is taking a page from the N.F.L.’s playbook in its quest to become the wealthiest sports league in North America. For the 2023 season onward, it will distribute football games among three broadcast networks: Fox, CBS, and NBC, all of which will have primetime slots to compete for.
The sheer size of the contract will provide the Big Ten and its members with stability in the years ahead, in addition to making the conference a scheduling superpower in college football. And it’s a huge increase over the previous pact between the conference and the league, which was worth around $430 million each year.
Fox, which owns a majority stake in the Big Ten Network, will be able to air a number of the conference’s marquee football games under the terms of a new agreement. The Big Ten currently consists of 14 schools, including popular names like Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State, and will expand to include Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles in 2024. Additionally, Fox will broadcast games on the Big Ten Network and FS1.
When compared to the Southeastern Conference, which sold its broadcasting rights to Disney and its network of outlets including ABC and ESPN, the Big Ten chose to negotiate with networks other than Fox.
CBS’s lengthy association with the SEC is coming to an end, so eventually, the network will replace its Saturday afternoon time slot, known for Southern football haven matches, with games from Big Ten powerhouses like Nebraska and Wisconsin.
NBC
In addition to the Notre Dame home games it already airs under a separate arrangement directly with the institution, NBC will select a Big Ten contest to broadcast, often in prime time. Games from the Big Ten will also be available on NBC’s streaming service, Peacock.
Even without the proposed additions of U.C.L.A. and U.S.C., CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus said, “The Big Ten will be on network television from noon on most Saturdays to 11 o’clock at night, which is unheard of.” McManus was attracted to the Big Ten as “a really national conference.”
Four people familiar with the negotiations and contracts described them, speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose the secret nature of the Big Ten’s discussions.
The contracts include not only football but also men’s and women’s basketball as well as all other sports that are sponsored by the conference (such as baseball, softball, and volleyball).
However, football served as the impetus for the talks. It was clear that Fox would continue to be the Big Ten’s primary broadcast partner, thus the competition centered on how the other media outlets may divide the conference’s portfolio.
ESPN
In an interview, Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren compared having numerous partners to having multiple siblings: “There’s a certain degree of healthy competition.” These partners included Amazon, Apple, ESPN, and WarnerMedia, which merged with Discovery this year.
ESPN’s absence from the agreement stands out more than any other service’s. Since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the network has had a close relationship with the Big Ten, giving it a disproportionate amount of power in shaping the public’s view of American athletics. ESPN, however, declined the Big Ten’s proposed terms and instead plans to highlight the SEC and the Atlantic Coast Conference, two other major professional sports conferences.
There are a number of ways that universities might profit from sports, but broadcasting rights are by far the most significant. In most cases, conferences handle the negotiations and distribute the funds to their members; the National Collegiate Athletic Association is in control of national postseason basketball.
According to a database maintained by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics at Syracuse University, Big Ten institutions were sharing less than $200 million in media rights money annually when adjusted for inflation less than 20 years ago.
The Big Ten had high hopes for reaching an agreement when they began talks, and those hopes were bolstered this summer when the conference stole UCLA and USC from the Pac-12 for the 2024 season. (The Big Ten’s reach will eventually embrace all of California and New Jersey, and the new contracts have mechanisms to raise their value if the conference’s ranks grow.)
The conference is encouraged by the slot’s success in bringing fans into the conference’s circle earlier on Saturdays at noon Eastern time for a top-tier football game and thus will continue to rely on it.
After the Big Ten initially canceled the 2020 football season due to the pandemic, Warren became one of the most reviled figures in college sports. “For you to be prepared to do the noon game — whatever food you’re putting in the Crock-Pot, whatever tailgate you’re doing, wherever the kids are going, are you driving, are you getting a ride to the game — you’ve got to start making those decisions on Friday,” Warren said.
Warren, who spent decades working for N.F.L. clubs, continued, “The earlier that I can establish an environment that we start getting into your psyche earlier, the better.”
This is the first time a collegiate league has obtained a deal that averages at least $1 billion yearly, and while the Big Ten will make a lot less than the N.F.L., whose media rights are valued at more than $10 billion per year, it is still a significant milestone.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s contract for its Division I men’s basketball tournament, a highlight of the March Madness extravaganza, is expected to grow to approximately $1.1 billion yearly by the end of this decade.
SEC
The Big Ten’s deal furthers its ongoing competition with the SEC in the business and sports worlds. In terms of money, it looks like the Big Ten is ahead.
After the 2023 season, the SEC’s premier football games will be broadcast by Disney instead of CBS, adding hundreds of millions of dollars to the league’s already lucrative relationship with the media giant. The new, albeit limited, arrangement was worth over $300 million annually before the SEC opted to add Oklahoma and Texas in 2025.
The commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, Greg Sankey, stated this summer that he had no regrets about signing the contract for his league’s marquee games at the time he did. Sankey made it clear that CBS “made decisions not to fulfil our expectations” in the midst of July reports that the network was close to a more expensive agreement to be anything other than the Big Ten’s major partner.
They made a decision that is a little hard to fathom,” Sankey said.
CBS Sports Chairman Sean McManus stated last week that he considered his network and Sankey’s conference had had a mutually beneficial partnership and that he thought “a piece of their success and growth is directly connected to” the CBS broadcast window. He predicted that “more dividends would have been paid for us under the Big Ten arrangement than by the SEC accord.”
After considering the benefits of joining the Big Ten and the potential reach of the arrangement on a national scale, McManus concluded that it was a good business move. “The transaction we discussed with the SEC didn’t make a lot of sense for us,” they said.
However, another football season must be completed before the new Big Ten deal can go into effect. Preseason rankings see SEC powerhouse Alabama as the top team. The Big Ten’s Ohio State Buckeyes are ranked second.