Will the Big Ten’s TV glut help the ACC with ESPN?

It has only been speculated, but it looks like the Big Ten may be knocking the Mothership – as ESPN is known in the sports television trade – out of the box. Fox remains the Big Ten’s primary TV partner and financial backer in the Big Ten Network subscription service since its inception in 2007.

According to the latest reports, the rest of the Big Ten football package will now include CBS for Saturday afternoon games and NBC for night games. Looks like Notre Dame will be playing all of its NBC home games in the afternoon.

CBS and NBC will each pay the Big Ten $350 million per year for their TV rights, which means all Fox needs to pay for its over-air schedule is $300 million to create the first billion-dollar package in college history.

If you didn’t hear ESPN in the mix, that’s because it is not. ABC and ESPN, both owned by Disney, have been carrying Big Ten games since the mid 1960’s, and now they are both apparently out.

That could open attractive windows for the ACC, which is looking to revise its current contract that runs through 2036. Depending on what the ACC looks like as a league, ESPN might be in play to pay more that it does today since the ACC Network is now on all the major cable carriers and has grown in popularity in its first three years of existence.

The Southeastern Conference is trying to keep up with the Big Ten in terms of annual distribution to its member schools and is locking up the Mothership in 2024 for a yet-to-be announced rights fee. But you can bet that between SEC games on both ESPN and the SEC Network, it may come close.

The Big Ten is brazenly projecting passing down a hundred million dollars annually to each of its schools, which will include UCLA and USC and who knows who else by the year 2029. What that means in terms of athletic budgets scares the daylights out of the remaining conferences.

The $35 million the ACC distributes today cannot keep pace with coaching salaries, recruiting budgets and facility growth of what the Big Ten and SEC will be able to do with their billion-dollar jack by then. Maybe there will be another player in the TV race, like Amazon is dipping into the NFL this season on Thursday night, but right now it looks like the ACC and ESPN will remain in business at some level.

 

Featured image via ESPN

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