The Big Ten is about to make some big bucks.
The conference has been hauling in big money for years thanks to lucrative agreements for TV rights to football and men's basketball games, but that number could be about to explode.
The Sports Business Journal's John Ourand and Michael Smith reported Tuesday that Fox is close to signing a deal that could be worth up to $250 million for just half of the Big Ten's media rights package, which is about 25 football games and 50 men's basketball games. The other half, per the report, would still be up for bid, with ESPN, CBS, NBC and Turner expected to be in the mix.
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The Big Ten's 10-year deal with ESPN and six-year deal with CBS expire after next spring, freeing up in the neighborhood of 50 football games and 100 basketball games, a package split in half for media-rights purposes.
A report from USA Today's Dan Wolken estimates that each of the 14 Big Ten schools could be receiving more than $30 million a year from these two new TV deals alone. That's $30 million a year before even factoring in the large amount of money produced by games on Big Ten Network. Add that in, and Wolken's estimating $40 million worth of TV money per school, per year.
That's a lot of cash.
And there could be even more cash coming. The agreement with Fox is reported to be a six-year deal, meaning all this would happen again just six years down the road. As Wolken points out, ESPN's agreement with the SEC — the network co-runs the SEC Network in addition to showing other games on its other channels — is 20 years long. The SEC handed out a huge payday bigger than $30 million per school last season through its deal with ESPN, but it won't be able to negotiate new contracts like the massive ones the Big Ten is negotiating for a long time.