The Big Ten’s big bet paid off Thursday.
Fifteen years ago, when the conference first formed the Big Ten Network through a joint venture with Fox, the Big Ten was told it was embarking on a fool’s errand. Not enough people would want that much league-centric broadcast content, and what consumers would want, the Big Ten would pay for siphoning off traditional partners, most notably ESPN.
The Worldwide Leader was a monolith then. It dominated the college sports broadcast landscape, had the biggest and best national print-digital machine, and was so multi-platform it even boasted a magazine and a radio network.
No one, it was believed, could take on ESPN. It had no peers.
It has one now.
Truthfully, we probably overstated ESPN’s position then. But the Big Ten broke its hegemony on college sports — crucially, college football — as we expected it would, when the league announced Thursday a seven-year, three-network media rights package that will pay more than $1 billion annually, and does not include ESPN.
When combined with Big Ten Network revenues, annual per-school distributions are expected to push, if not pass, $100 million.
“We are very grateful,” Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren said in a statement Thursday, “to our world-class media partners for recognizing the strength of the Big Ten Conference brand and providing the incredible resources we need for our student-athletes to compete at the very highest levels, and to achieve their academic and athletics goals.”
WHAT IT MEANS: The details behind the Big Ten’s landmark media rights deal
OPEN RACES: The biggest quarterback competitions that remain undecided
UNFAMILIAR FOES: The 10 best non-conference games for this season
The Big Ten-ESPN divorce was not unexpected. It had been widely reported in recent weeks that the relationship between America’s oldest conference and its most-recognizable sports broadcast provider was almost certainly going to end with this rights package. ESPN and the Big Ten can trace their marriage back to the early 1980s, but as the network drew closer to the SEC and ACC (with whom it operates conference-specific TV channels of their own) and the Big Ten grew stronger, tighter bonds with Fox, the split seemed inevitable.
Thursday still redrew some of the old boundaries in significant ways.
Fox’s long-term…