How am I supposed to know how upset I’m supposed to be without Gritty here to paint a gruesome picture?
Mornin' fellas
It smells just a tad like this is a final gambit by the league to get ESPN to pony up, but maybe they won't.
Once the notion of NBC packaging ND with Big Ten games surfaced, which created the Fox-CBS-NBC Saturday Tripleheader concept, that always sounded like it was gonna be too sexy to turn away from. And in terms of its top-level football brand, that's freakin' great for the Big Ten, no two ways about it. As I said before, that 2:30 CBS slot is the penthouse real estate of the sport, and in getting NBC to create a new evening window they are actually expanding the territory for college football onto prime time of one of the three major networks. The visibility of those three games will be gigantic, I expect to see them competing very successfully at the top of the ratings charts with the flagship SEC broadcasts when that competition gets underway next year (that will be a big focus I bet, a Letterman vs Leno or Raw vs Nitro for college football).
One other thought: NBC getting a chunk, seems like ND is virtually inevitable.
In the short term it seems very much the opposite. ND and the Big Ten are being explicitly packaged as a doubleheader duo here for NBC. But over the longer term, if the Big Ten-NBC partnership is successful, ND joining the Big Ten starts to make a lot of financial and programming sense for NBC and the schools and conferences are ever more openly doing the bidding of the hands that feed them now.
Noting that I don't understand how any of this works, including what is meant by "late windows", but are we sure those will be "competition-free"? Couldn't the B10 structure their schedule to ensure at least one of the L.A. schools is at home each week, to fill a west coast prime time slot? And wouldn't that often be far more appetizing than what the Pac12 can offer, at least in terms of "national appeal"?
The Big Ten *could*, but its schools don't want to and the league doesn't have to given its position of strength elsewhere. The Pac 12's best game as a 9PM start is a nice after dinner mint for ESPN's prime time SEC game, in theory.
Anyway, I told you so that the Big12/Pac12's best option was to wait until the Big Ten finalized and left content-hungry players at the altar.
Just tracking the money, if $1 billion was the expectation before USC and UCLA, $1.14 billion would be the number just to keep the shares the same size per school. So that's a number to keep in your head.
Apple is reportedly in talks to acquire the streaming rights to Big Ten, one of the most prominent conferences for college sports, presumably for Apple TV+.
appleinsider.com
It's important to note that there's apparently a fourth package going exclusively to a streamer. Totally spitballing I wonder if that would be a one game Thursday or Friday night exclusive package, or if it would be something bigger. Anyway, given the high profile of the rest of it, it's going to be annoying and of course Illinois will be scheduled in that game more than any other school, guaranteed.
So many other questions jump to mind
- How are the selections going to be done between Fox, CBS, and NBC?
- If Fox gets the best game (as seems to be everyone's assumption) are they making USC constantly play road games at 9AM PT? Surely they couldn't force them to play a home game then, right?
- Are CBS and NBC going to be getting any of the spare inventory to put on CBSSN (we better super duper hope not) or USA (the holding pen for former NBCSN content)? You'd imagine there will be tons on FS1, but is the BTN package getting bigger or smaller here?
- Whither Basketball? The pessimistic note you have to add here is that the move from ESPN to FS1 marks a tremendous downsizing of audience for the kinds of Big Ten basketball games Illinois now regularly plays. But there are more questions than answers there, FS1 was already showing Big Ten basketball regularly and with their other commitments they don't have the airtime to soak up everything ESPN was showing. Plus it's a 16 team league now. Regular showings on FS2 or CBSSN would be really disappointing.
For scale, ESPN paid $300 million per year to wrestle the SEC package away from CBS. Though that was before Texas and Oklahoma.
Anyway, looks like it's war with ESPN. That will be interesting for sure.
