Big Ten Announces 7-Year/7 Billion-Dollar Media Rights Deal

Unless you’ve been living in an eco-village for the past several weeks, you probably have been reading rumors about the Big Ten’s massive new media rights deal and how ESPN/ABC was likely to get shut out. Well, now it’s official: FOX, CBS, and NBC will be showing B1G football, basketball, and other Olympic sports starting in 2023-24, with a seven-year deal worth over $7 billion.

We will have more posts about this monumental deal and what it means for the B1G and especially Penn State, but the important details to remember for now are this:

• FOX will continue to have the Noon window (so “Big Noon Kick” ain’t going anywhere, folks) which means you’ll continue to hear Gus Johnson climaxing on air after every big play.
• CBS will get the 3:30 window of games, with the same production team that does SEC games currently switching over to B1G. So, expect Brad Nessler and Gary Danielson to be calling the games as well that amazing, iconic, theme song. Based on the tweet below, the folks at CBS Sports are absolutely giddy over this.

• NBC will get the primetime window of games, which will coincide nicely as part of a doubleheader with Notre Dame football. Additionally, Peacock will get a handful of games for streaming only. Meanwhile, Lorne Michaels and the producers at Saturday Night Live have to be liking this, as it could mean more eyeballs on their show coming off the primetime football game. Not to mention, NBC now has a solid weekend of college and pro football to promote the hell out of with Notre Dame/B1G on Saturdays and Sunday Night Football.
• ESPN’s 40-year streak of televising Big Ten games is slated to end after this season, as well as ABC’s 56-year streak of doing the same. For many of us, this spans our entire college football-viewing lifetimes. Ch-ch-changes, indeed.