Big Ten Reaches Record Nearly $8 Billion TV Deal After Expanding Conference to Add UCLA and USC
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The Big Ten has come to a new seven-year media rights agreement with Fox, CBS, and NBC, making the largest annual deal for any college sports league, topping $1 billion a year.
The deal will begin on July 1st, 2024 and will run through the 2029-30 athletic year. In new record agreements with Fox, CBS, and NBC, the Big Ten Conference is set to bring in nearly $8 billion in media rights, providing even more income to one of the nation’s most powerful collegiate athletic conferences. The conference could move to add even more teams going forward, and the media rights contracts detail mechanisms for the Big Ten to increase their worth if they continued to grow.
Earlier this summer, the Big Ten voted to add UCLA and USC as members beginning in 2024, marshaling a new era of expansion for the conference. The two schools join the conference during the second year of the brand new TV deal and as a result, the revenue will rise substantially beginning in year three.
Notably, ESPN’s TV platform is absent from the deal in a shocking development for the conference. The network has been tied to the Big Ten for many years and its influence over the sports world is undeniable.
According to reporting, ESPN rejected the Big Ten’s offer of a seven-year $380 million deal, which ultimately would have decreased the network’s current number of games. Disney, which controls ESPN, refused to agree to the deal with the conference and will instead showcase other top conferences like the SEC.
The Big Ten is projected to distribute $80 million-$100 million per year to each of its 16 members.
The conference designed the deal to allow different networks to have specific windows of Big Ten coverage on college football Saturdays. Fox, the dominant shareholder in the Big Ten Network, will air games beginning at noon ET. CBS, whose long-term agreement with the SEC expires in 2023, will begin airing Big Ten games in the mid-afternoon window in 2024. NBC will carry Big Ten primetime games, which will be branded “Big Ten Saturday night.”
