Big Ten to cash in with new ESPN deal

The six-year agreement with ESPN is now being vetted by lawyers, the report said, and the deal would take effect next fall. Fox won the rights to broadcast the other half – featuring a similar 25/50 split – by agreeing earlier this year to pay an average of $240 million annually. CBS Sports plans to renew its basketball coverage for $10 million per year, according to SBJ. In addition to ESPN and Fox, CBS has kept its basketball rights meaning that the conference’s media partners will remain the same, but how you watch the games especially for football and basketball will change. FOX will purchase the other half, as was reported by the SBJ back in April.

Two of the Big Ten’s most powerful Jims – Delany and Phillips – put out an ominous warning last month about conference media rights and ESPN.

The new deal will almost triple the amount of money the Big Ten now receives.

The Big Ten’s media windfall over the six-year period totals $2.64 billion.

The Big Ten-ESPN partnership will carry on after all. While Fox has entered the college sports realm through its Big 12 and Pac-12 contracts, to get the Big Ten is a huge feather in its cap.

The report says the deals are being reviewed by the conference’s lawyers, and the Big Ten hopes to announce them at its football kickoff luncheon July 26. Fox Sports owns 51 percent of BTN.

We don’t normally spend much time discussing college sports carriage deals here, but this one is worth noting because of the context: For the past year, the TV Industrial Complex has been shuddering because of ESPN’s disclosure that it had lost a sizable number of subscribers.

Media payouts for member institutions will get a huge increase. After a flurry of phone calls and emails, Skipper and Delany reached a broad agreement on price.

ESPN President John Skipper said publicly that the network would like to continue its partnership with the league. The deals were finalized June 7-8 when executives from ESPN and Fox were holed up in a conference room at the Big Ten’s Chicago offices over two days to hammer out details on how each package would look.

This is good news for the conference, considering that it won’t be threatened by any type of ESPN boycott in the future.

So the Big 10 deal signals that the new conventional wisdom isn’t right, at least not yet.