The Billionaire's Club

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The day after the Big Ten approved $8 billion worth of media rights deals with CBS, Fox and NBC, conference Commissioner Kevin Warren hopped on an early morning flight to Atlanta and then drove a rental car to Birmingham, where the daughter of a friend was getting married.

It wasn’t lost on Warren that he was driving straight through the heart of SEC country just hours after closing the richest conference media deal in the history of college athletics. It also provided Warren with a few hours to reflect on his mentor and former SEC commissioner, the late Mike Slive, who closed a few deals in his day and who remains a guiding force for Warren.

“It was a good trip,” Warren said.

Warren had been the Big Ten’s commissioner just a few months when he had his first meeting with CBS to discuss college basketball. It was the fall of 2019, and he had already started thinking about the Big Ten’s media future.

Those talks culminated last week with media rights contracts across CBS, Fox and NBC that will total $8 billion over seven years. The three deals combined will pay the conference an average of about about $1.15 billion per year and put the Big Ten’s schools well ahead of their peers in revenue.

The conference in its previous media rights deals with Fox and ESPN was making $440 million per year, meaning the new deals will provide the Big Ten with nearly a three-times increase starting with the 2023-24 season and going through the 2029-30 fiscal year.

Fox has the premier package with 30-plus football games annually, while CBS and NBC will have 15-16 games each.

The most notable absence in this set of deals is ESPN, which had a 40-year relationship with the Big Ten, but couldn’t come to terms with the conference during the most recent negotiations. ESPN’s current rights with the Big Ten go through 2022-23; however, sources indicated there’s a possibility that talks could re-open to bring ESPN back to the table for a smaller package of games than what they originally negotiated for.

Kevin Warren’s start at the Big Ten was a little rocky thanks in large part to the pandemic, but his vision for a new media rights package has paid off with record numbers.getty images

Even without ESPN, the Big Ten’s new set of partners will provide a powerhouse lineup of college football on Saturdays in the fall. It will start with Fox’s “Big Noon Saturday” at noon ET, followed by CBS’s 3:30 p.m. window and NBC’s new “Big Ten Saturday Night” game in prime time.

The Fox-CBS-NBC triumvirate will provide the Big Ten with an NFL-like lineup of games on over-the-air TV.

“The goal was to own each of these windows,” said Warren, the former Vikings COO who used the NFL as a model for the Big Ten’s own rights negotiations. “To capture the hearts and minds and the fan avidity, I think you’ve got to make it very simple for your fans. So, I always had this visual, especially coming out of the NFL, that we’d have partners in each one of those windows. And then we’d have some special events, like two games on Black Friday.”

FS1 and Big Ten Network also will carry a heavy dose of college football across its airwaves.

Big Ten schools will benefit financially from the rights fees increases, but not right away. The conference has paid out around $50 million per school under its current terms. That per-school average is not expected to change much in 2022-23, the final year of the current deal.

The first few years of the new deal, which kicks in during the 2023-24 school year, has a slight slope, meaning revenue will increase gradually. Like many media rights deals that are backloaded like this one, the more drastic increases are in the second half of the deal.

With annual revenue reaching $1.15 billion, divided by 16 schools, including new additions USC and UCLA in 2024, the per-school payouts could reach $70 million or more. Conference payouts also include bowl games, postseason championships and sponsorship sales, which will drive that per-school number even higher.

The SEC, which distributed $55 million a year per school in fiscal 2021, also has an extended rights deal with ESPN for $300 million a year that will begin after the 2023 football season, bringing the league’s total package to $710 million annually.

In addition to the Big Ten football lineup, Warren added some pieces to the deals, like putting the women’s basketball tournament championship on CBS for the first time.

“That’s big,” Warren said.

NBCUniversal’s direct-to-consumer product, Peacock, will be the conference’s streaming home. NBC’s Saturday night games will simul-stream on Peacock and the service will have its own selection of eight games as well.

The conference will conduct a draft among the three networks to determine who gets which games.

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Among the other unique elements in these deals, NBC has committed to a $100,000 advertising budget with each conference school to promote their academic missions. Warren said it’s similar to Notre Dame’s “What would you fight for?” two-minute video series that runs on NBC during the Fighting Irish’s football games.

The chief complication the Big Ten had to work through with CBS was its contractual commitment to the SEC for 3:30 p.m. games during the 2022 and 2023 seasons, meaning there is one year of overlap for CBS between the two leagues in 2023.

CBS will fulfill its SEC contract in 2023 before shifting over to the Big Ten in that window in 2024.

“That 3:30 window is the best showcase in college football,” CBS Sports Chair Sean McManus said.

That juggling will leave CBS with a reduced package of seven Big Ten games for the 2023 season, compared to 14-15 games in subsequent seasons.

Those Big Ten games on CBS mostly will be games early in the season before its SEC schedule begins.

CBS’s presentation of Big Ten games will look and sound like its SEC games, from the announcers to the music and overall production. Warren said the long-term benefit of having CBS as a partner was easily worth navigating the short-term conflict.

“I made up my mind early on that I was not going to put CBS in a position where they had to say no because they had to break the SEC contract,” Warren said. “That wasn’t the right thing to do. So, we just had to get creative. You’ve got a partner you’re excited about and you don’t want to lose that, so they’re going to have half of a package in that first year.”

NBC’s football inventory will be 16 games per season in prime time.

Fox’s package will range from 24-27 games in 2023 to 30-32 games through the 2029 season. The network is coming off a banner season in which its “Big Noon Saturday” time slot was the most-watched window in all of college football with an average audience of 5.7 million viewers.

Fox, which has a deeper relationship with the Big Ten than other networks, has been in business with the conference since 2007 when they teamed up to form the Big Ten Network. Fox owns 61% of BTN now, and the network will take the majority of the football and men’s basketball inventory as part of their new agreement.

Each of the three networks will have a Big Ten football championship game — Fox will have four, CBS two and NBC one.

NBC’s lineup on linear TV will tout Notre Dame in a 3:30 p.m. window, followed by the Big Ten game on Saturday night, providing the network with a hefty 1-2 college football punch.

NBC’s longstanding relationship with Notre Dame also could create more matchups between the Fighting Irish and Big Ten schools, like Michigan, which has fallen off Notre Dame’s schedule in recent years. The two rivals have played just twice since 2014 and aren’t scheduled to play again until 2033.

NBC might be in a better position to facilitate some of those games, depending on how aggressive the Irish want to schedule in the future.

“To be able to create this lineup of games on linear channels — the word that comes to mind is home run,” said former Fox Sports President Bob Thompson, who now runs a media consultancy. “It’s like the anti-streamer package. … This is huge for all of these local stations. Then you’ve got the ability to promote and cross-promote these games across the channels.

“When you think about who the competitors will be to bid on the College Football Playoff, it used to be just ESPN and Fox. Now, with NBC a player and CBS still involved, who knows if they might go shopping for something else.”

The Big Ten’s negotiations finally ran their course last week when the commissioner made his presentation to the conference’s presidents and chancellors and athletic directors. They voted to approve last Friday.

“Commissioner Warren’s leadership and vision have resulted in the growth and recent market expansion of the Big Ten,” Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks said in a release through the network. “In an ever-evolving landscape, the Big Ten remains the most storied collegiate athletic conference in the country.”

Warren, whose background in the NFL exposed him to some pretty complicated deals, such as construction of U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, called the Big Ten’s talks “the most complex I’ve ever worked on. It was a combination of working with multiple parties and just the marketplace we’re in now, with everything going on in college athletics.” Over the course of negotiations, the Big Ten had to put things on hold because USC and UCLA applied as members.

“We had already put expansion in the term sheets when USC and UCLA came along,” Warren said. “We had been talking about expansion since I was hired in 2019. … But it truly was seven, eight, nine, 10-dimensional chess at all times. It was demanding spiritually, emotionally, physically and mentally. Starting around the first of this year, there was something to do literally every day on this.”

Another media expert, Len DeLuca, the former CBS, IMG and ESPN executive who now teaches at New York University’s Stern College of Business, said the Big Ten benefited from three major factors: the evolution of these mega-deals in college athletics; the structure of the deals that put games on over-the-air TV; and perhaps most importantly, timing. NBC and CBS both found themselves with needs and resources at a time when college football is flourishing. 

“This was inevitable,” DeLuca said. “This is the evolutionary process of college football reaching its next level. … The surprising piece for me has been NBC and the fact that they’ve been this active.”

Unlike most other commissioners, Warren didn’t use a traditional media consultant. Instead, he relied on his legal background and a team of internal experts: Kerry Kenny, senior vice president, television; Anil Gollahalli, general counsel; Adam Neuman, deputy general counsel; Diana Sabau, deputy commissioner; and CFO Laura Anderson.

Warren was comfortable with the staff he has built in the Big Ten’s front office, not to mention the hundreds of thousands, maybe more, the conference saved by not hiring a consultant.

When the conference did have a need, Warren leaned on industry legal and media experts — Proskauer’s Joe Leccese and Endeavor’s Karen Brodkin and Hillary Mandel.

With a collection of deals that go out to 2029-30, Warren said it won’t be long before the conference is back at the table.

“It’s been a challenge and it’s been complex,” Warren said of coordinating deals with three networks. “But that’s what makes the journey so rewarding.”