In an apparent first for college basketball, and assuredly a sign of things to come, Prime Video has reached a deal with Duke men’s basketball for marquee non-conference games.
Prime Video announced Thursday that it has reached a multi-year deal with Duke men’s basketball to carry three neutral-site games per season, including matchups against reigning NCAA national champion Michigan and runner-up UConn this coming season. The first of the games will pit Duke against UConn Thanksgiving Eve from Las Vegas, with the second pitting Duke against Michigan on December 21 from Madison Square Garden in New York.
The final game will be during the conference play portion of the season when Duke faces Gonzaga in Detroit February 20, the first weekend after the Super Bowl. Prime Video will produce all three games and distribute them globally.
While neutral site tournaments exist outside of any conference media rights deals, there would not seem to be much — if any — precedent for teams peeling off individual neutral site games to sell outside of their existing rights deals.
Last year, USC reportedly sought to sell Netflix rights to its annual football game against Notre Dame, but the move was strongly opposed by the Big Ten, which controls rights to all of its schools’ home football games. According to John Ourand of Puck at the time, USC and Netflix tried to get around that restriction by scheduling the game at a neutral site, but the conference “almost immediately shut down the idea, and the conference made clear that USC was not allowed to sell media rights to individual, non-conference games on their own, regardless of where they are played.”
In this case, Duke received permission from the ACC and its media rights partner ESPN to sell rights to the three games in exchange for “future scheduling commitments,” according to Pete Thamel of ESPN.
While regular season college basketball is not nearly as big a viewership draw as college football, marquee non-conference games can generate strong audiences. Michigan-Duke this past season averaged 4.32 million viewers on ESPN, the network’s largest men’s college basketball audience in seven years (with the standard caveats regarding Nielsen methodological changes).
The Prime-Duke deal is of course not the first foray into college basketball for the major streaming services — Peacock regularly carries a full slate of games across multiple conferences — but it seems likely to result in a greater presence going forward. The very idea of peeling off a handful of marquee standalone games is the kind of strategy more associated with Netflix, and one would imagine that the streamer will at least be mentioned in any future deals of this type.
