Topping $1 Billion a Year, Big Ten Signs Record TV Deal for College Conference

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/sports/ncaafootball/big-ten-deal-tv.html
https://archive.ph/hQO9H

Topping $1 Billion a Year, Big Ten Signs Record TV Deal for College Conference
The agreement splits the Big Ten’s sports between Fox, NBC and CBS, and is the richest annual deal for any college sports league.
By Alan Blinder and Kevin Draper
Aug. 18, 2022

The Big Ten Conference has reached the richest-ever television agreement for a college athletic league, selling the rights to its competitions for an average of at least $1 billion a year.

The seven-year arrangement cements the Big Ten as one of the nation’s pre-eminent college sports leagues, but it promises to fuel the intensifying debate over how universities should treat athletes who are not paid salaries.

The deal, which reflects television networks’ desire to capitalize on America’s enormous appetite for sports, comes at a time of extraordinary upheaval in college athletics. The college sports industry has faced setbacks in statehouses and courtrooms, including one at the Supreme Court in 2021 that made it more vulnerable to antitrust challenges. And college sports’ diminished political influence has helped empower athletes to speak out against longstanding rules, like the ones that until last year had kept them from making money off their fame.

In turn, administrators and coaches have grown anxious as they watched their control ebb and the economic dynamics start to change.

Now the Big Ten is borrowing from a strategy that the N.F.L. has relied on to become North America’s wealthiest sports league and will split football games among multiple broadcast networks, with Fox, CBS and NBC each armed with sought-after time slots.

[rubbersole]

1. College football seemed like a wholesome alternative to pro football.

Team loyalty is missing when money becomes the biggest goal. "Team" will soon become a quaint memory with the NIL and transfer portal. It was an inevitable consequence. But it was great fun while it lasted. A scholarship wasn't ever enough but it felt OK.

[moondust]

2. Big Ten now including USC and UCLA.

I'm sure the players who do all the work and suffer all the injuries will get very, very, very rich off the deal.