NBC is setting a high price tag for next year’s Big Ten football championship game.
NBC remains in talks with Amazon Prime Video to potentially sell its rights to next year’s Big Ten title game and is looking to do so for as much as $70 million, John Ourand of Puck reported Monday night. That price tag would be a solid fifth of the reported $350 million/year NBC pays for Big Ten rights.
To put that number in perspective, Netflix is paying $70-80 million per game for rights to Christmas Day NFL games, as Ourand reported last year. It is also believed to be paying $50 million/year for a package of Major League Baseball games that starts next season.
The $70 million figure also exceeds the $40 million in compensation the Big Ten reportedly paid to Fox Sports for selling next year’s game to NBC without its approval. Fox controls all of the Big Ten media rights by virtue of its ownership of Big Ten Network, and its executives have famously been in the room when the other networks were pursuing deals with the conference.
As might go without saying, Fox would need to sign off on any sale to Amazon, and the company has thus far signaled opposition to the move, per Ourand. The Big Ten would also need to approve, and the conference previously rebuffed efforts by USC to sell rights to the annual Notre Dame-USC game to Netflix.
Next year’s Big Ten title game is the only one on NBC in the life of the conference’s media rights deal. FOX has this year’s game and CBS aired it last year.
Amazon has never carried college football, but was a contender for the Big Ten rights package that eventually went to NBC. In addition to its billion-dollar “Thursday Night Football” and NBA contracts, the streamer pays more than $100 million each for a pair of individual NFL games, one on Black Friday and the other over Wild Card weekend.
