Big 12 Signs $2.6B Dollar Football, Basketball Deal
DALLAS (AP) — The Big 12 announced an agreement Friday with ESPN and Fox Sports on a 13-year contract reportedly worth $2.6 billion to televise football and men's basketball through 2024-25.
Financial terms weren't released, but ESPN cited anonymous sources in reporting the contract was worth an average of $20 million per school each year.
The deal will include games on ABC and all of the ESPN platforms, including the Longhorn Network. ESPN said Fox Sports was also part of the agreement.
"The stability of the Big 12 Conference is cemented," commissioner Bob Bowlsby said in a statement. "We are positioned with one of the best media rights arrangements in collegiate sports, providing the conference and its members unprecedented revenue growth, and sports programming over two networks."
ESPN said it will televise up to 19 conference-controlled football games through 2015, then that number would increase to 23 starting in 2016. ESPN will have exclusive rights to the Big 12 basketball tournament and will televise up to 105 games per season.
The TV deal was already in the works when Bowlsby, the former Stanford athletic director, was named commissioner in May.
It came after two summers of uncertainty when it appeared that the Big 12 was on the brink of collapse. The conference lost four schools to three other conferences, but the BCS league now seems secure for years to come.
There are 10 schools in the league now. TCU and West Virginia began play this season, offsetting the departures of Texas A&M and Missouri to the SEC this year. Nebraska previously went to the Big Ten and Colorado to the Pac-12.
