Confirming the reporting of the past month, NBC Sports president Rick Cordella acknowledged that the company is looking to sell its rights to the Big Ten title game.
In a podcast published Monday, Cordella confirmed to Richard Deitsch of The Athletic that the company is shopping its rights to next year’s Big Ten football championship game, but avoided specifics when asked if Amazon is the favorite. Cordella’s comments were the first on-the-record confirmation by anyone at NBC about the talks, which were reported by John Ourand of Puck last month.
Cordella characterized the talks as “one of these things that pops up every once in a while where there’s an opportunity to do something that we feel is in our best interest financially.” He stressed that NBC ‘loves’ the Big Ten, “but an opportunity came up and we’re having some discussions.”
Ourand has given all indication that Amazon is the primary — perhaps even the sole — contender to acquire the game, with Netflix said to be uninterested and no other platforms even being mentioned as a possibility. But Cordella disputed the idea that there is “anyone in the pole position or not the pole position” and said the company has to “go through the process here and see what makes sense for us, for the league, for Fox, for whoever may license this.”
Next year’s Big Ten title game is the only one on NBC as part of the network’s rights deal with the conference. According to reporting by ESPN’s Pete Thamel in 2023, the Big Ten under then-commissioner Kevin Warren awarded NBC the 2026 game without the permission of Fox Sports, which controls all of the conference’s media inventory through its ownership of Big Ten Network. Fox was ultimately compensated $40 million.
Both the Big Ten and Fox would have to sign off on NBC selling rights to the game.
This past year’s Big Ten title game, pitting the nation’s top-ranked teams, was easily the most-watched in the relatively short history of the event with 18.33 million viewers. Officially, that is the largest audience on record for any college football conference championship game, though Nielsen methodological changes will generally skew comparisons to past years.
Per Ourand, NBC is seeking around $70 million for the game, a figure that would be in line with the per-game price Netflix is reportedly paying for its Christmas Day NFL games.
