“How did the presidents, chancellors and athletic directors not know this? The universities all signed off on the deal.” “The fault here is with the administrators on campus,” said another industry source. But for a primetime spot on a broadcast network? Grab your long underwear and go. Play that game in the afternoon TV ain’t paying enough for those games. Now, if we’re talking a FS1 or BTN broadcast, that’s different. But I also recognize that NBC is a huge platform for the Big Ten, so my take is that the Big Ten should take advantage of this exposure for a network broadcast. And Lincoln, Nebraska is one of the more southerly schools in the Big Ten, so it’s got to be better weather on average than, say Ann Arbor or Minneapolis. Listen, I’m no fan of sitting in Memorial Stadium in November at night. Michigan acting surprised like “What? We have to play at night in November?” seems rather overdone. Were they really going to pay top dollar to show Rutgers vs Indiana? This has been known since last August when the contract was announced. Plus with Fox essentially sublicensing their rights to CBS and NBC, Fox HAD to be in control of this situation.Īs for the “night games in November” argument, the question has to be asked: “What were you thinking NBC was signing up to do?” The agreement was for a “Big Ten Saturday Night” package, complete with a treatment much like NBC provides for their Sunday Night NFL productions. That’s a weird arrangement, but that’s on previous commissioner Jim Delany, not Warren. On the first point, Fox had a seat at the bargaining table because the Big Ten’s media rights actually belong to BTN, not the conference.and BTN is majority-owned by Fox. Several big Big Ten schools (Michigan and Ohio State, primarily) are pushing back at having to play night games in November.Īt face value, both of these arguments seem silly.The Big Ten will need to reimburse Fox $40 million for awarding a conference championship football game to NBC. And the first thing to keep in mind is that this story came from ESPN - the very network that lost the rights to the Big Ten. How big are these sticking points? And who screwed it up? The common scapegoat is outgoing commissioner Kevin Warren, but some of this criticism doesn’t hold up when you read the details. At the time, it sounded like the seven year deal that could have been worth up to $8 billion, but now Thamel’s report makes it sound like there are few sticking points that could reduce the size of the deal. ’s Pete Thamel broke the story over the weekend how new Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti has spent most of his first month of the season trying to tie up the loose ends of the Big Ten’s new multi-billion dollar contract with CBS, Fox and NBC.
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