From John Ourand in today’s Sports Business Daily, ESPN has matched NBC’s offer to air Big East football and basketball. Earlier this week, it was reported that the Big East came to an agreement with NBC Sports Network, a deal with more $20 million annually over six years. Today was the deadline for ESPN to match the offer which it apparently has.
However, ESPN has to work out the number of exposures on its network and on other entities. If ESPN gains the contract, expect the network to sublicense football and basketball games to Fox Sports 1. The Big East has worked out a separate agreement with CBS for basketball.
The conference presidents have to sign off on the deal. If the number of exposures cannot be worked out, then the contract reverts to NBC Sports so there’s hope, albeit slim for the Peacock to attain its first major college conference. If NBC wins out, some football games would be shuffled to the broadcast network. According to Ourand, ESPN would not send any games to ABC.
So there’s still some work to be done if ESPN is to keep the Big East. If it does, we can expect the unholy alliance between ESPN and Fox to be in effect once again to prevent NBC from gaining a foothold in college sports. The alliance works for the Big 12 and the Pac-12. However, if NBC Sports Network can somehow get the Big East, it would have plenty of live inventory from football and basketball and perhaps some Olympic Sports during the spring.
If NBC is shut out, then it will be a long wait for the next college contract which will be the Big Ten in the second half of this decade.
We’ll be keeping an eye on this story as it develops.
This is all speculation right now. We’ll keep you up to date
