The Big Ten Conference enters the 2026 college football season boasting the last three national champions. Indiana’s victory over Miami in January’s College Football Playoff National Championship drew more than 30 million viewers on ESPN, officially marking the most watched college football game in a decade. The SEC, by contrast, has not even appeared in the title game in three straight years. But where the Big Ten dominates in January, the SEC dominates in September, October, and November, and there is no reason to believe that will change anytime soon.
College football’s two most powerful conferences have been engaged in a number of battles for superiority. The Big Ten’s three-straight national titles are certainly impressive accomplishments, but in the TV ratings, the SEC has been the clear winner since beginning its current media rights deal with ESPN/ABC in 2024. Of the 84 primary regular-season Saturday broadcast windows since the start of the 2024 season, the most-viewed game has aired on ABC or ESPN 64 times (including 57 times as a part of the SEC’s package), while Big Ten rightsholders Fox, NBC and CBS have combined for just 20 (15 on FOX, including three Big 12 games).
Discussions on the current television deals began in 2019 when CBS passed on renewing its $55 million/year deal with the SEC, leaving an opening for ESPN to acquire the package for $300 million annually. ESPN had been airing SEC football for years, but only on cable, and never in the primary 3:30 PM ET window. During most of the 2010s, ESPN was splitting its audience between the Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, and ACC games that aired on ABC, and the SEC games that aired on ESPN. The new agreement, announced in 2019 and effective in 2024, allows ESPN/ABC to position SEC football in any window to maximize its audience, which in practice has resulted in an SEC tripleheader on ABC nearly every week of the season. ESPN puts massive promotional effort into its full day of SEC football, beginning with College GameDay, and ending with Fowler and Herbstreit on Saturday Night Football.
A mutually-beneficial upcycle exists as follows: ESPN exerts heavy promotional effort into a high-profile SEC matchup, produces a high-quality presentation (the 2024 “SEC on ABC” was the first college sports series to win a Sports Emmy in more than four decades), and then gets a tremendous audience. The big ratings number leads ESPN to push promotion for the next game, and the cycle continues. It is a winning strategy, so ESPN has no reason to depart from it.
The Big Ten approached its rights deals differently. From the start, the arrangement is unusual. All Big Ten telecasts are effectively a sublicense from the Big Ten Network, of which Fox Sports is a majority owner. This meant that during the negotiations around the most recent rights deals, Fox executives were in the room while other platforms were pitching.
Former Big Ten commissioner and current NFL executive Kevin Warren wanted to leverage his pro football experience in constructing the next set of broadcast deals. The league developed a NFL-like model that would give “Game of the Week” broadcast exposure to three networks: Fox at Noon ET (continuing its positively-trending “Big Noon Saturday” franchise), CBS at 3:30 (which was seeking a replacement for its lost SEC package), and NBC in primetime (modeled after Sunday Night Football). The conference received a massive payday (more than 60% more than what the SEC was getting) and was widely praised for its pro football scheduling model. The Big Ten’s deal began on a limited basis in 2023, but the triple-wide windows were fully in place for the 2024 season.
While a strong plan in theory, the Big Ten was immediately overwhelmed by ABC’s performance in 2024 and 2025, a trend which will be difficult to reverse in 2026 due to scheduling practices. This season, the SEC moves to a nine-game conference slate, in line with the Big Ten and Big 12, replacing games against Arkansas State and Toledo for more games against Georgia and Tennessee. However, a potential downside comes as the expanded schedule places eight additional losses on the records of SEC teams, which could affect the perception of playoff contenders.
While the expanded Big Ten creates interesting meetings like Ohio State-USC and Michigan-Oregon, it also reduces the number of classic Midwest matchups in favor of games like UCLA-Iowa or Rutgers-Washington. The SEC was more disciplined in its approach to expansion: Oklahoma-Florida and Texas-LSU reasonably pass as regional matchups despite limited series history.
The non-conference schedule also has some issues. Last year, FOX came out of the gate with a massive audience of 16.6 million for Texas-Ohio State, the most-viewed game of the season until Ohio State-Michigan. Ohio State-Texas flips to Austin this year, so the game will be televised by ABC in primetime — presumably providing an upgrade over the already-strong 9.7 million it drew for Michigan-Oklahoma in the same window last year. This year, FOX opens its slate with North Texas-Indiana, an unattractive matchup despite the presence of the defending champions. FOX should make up some ground in Week 2 when it airs Oklahoma-Michigan, but it will still be trying to catch up to last year’s average.
The fact that the defending national champions are opening up against North Texas and not a marquee opponent is an indictment of the Big Ten’s scheduling policies, which does not require teams to face a tenth power conference opponent. The Hoosiers join Nebraska, Penn State, USC, and Washington in not including a non-conference Power Four opponent on their 2026 schedule, which certainly creates a challenge for the Big Ten’s media partners early in the season. Meanwhile, the first three weeks of the SEC schedule are highlighted by Clemson-LSU, Ohio State-Texas, and Florida State-Alabama, all on ABC.
Asked specifically about this point at media days this week, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said, “We’ve talked a lot about scheduling in our AD room and with our coaches about what’s coming next and what’s the right way to do things. I will tell you that our focus now is seeing clarity around the playoff and access and how that’s going to work before we make the next decision.”
The networks did not begin televising college football to win ratings PR battles or to fuel debates about conference superiority on social media, they did it the reason every media company does anything — to generate revenue for shareholders. The second-place network is still making money. As long as a network feels the revenue generated through advertising and carriage fees can justify the rights fees and expenses, it cannot be considered a loss. Those specific financials will never be publicly disclosed, so it’s difficult to ascertain whether any of this is profitable.
But the rights fees do not line up with the ratings. While true figures are impossible to gauge given the number of streaming-exclusive games for which viewership is not available, it seems unlikely that the total value provided by the Big Ten to its three partners is 60% greater than the total value the SEC provides to Disney/ESPN.
So what’s next for the Big Ten after its current deal expires after the 2029 season? The current tri-network model seems to be satisfactory for fans, but will NBC and CBS want to keep paying if its not worth the investment? If those broadcast networks are out, additional partners like Prime Video or TNT are not likely to draw more viewership than broadcast TV. Perhaps the best bet would be to go all-in with the SEC model, and air the three or four best games weekly on the FOX broadcast network. Could all-day exposure on Fox lead to the same kind of growth the SEC has seen on ABC? As it currently stands, Fox’s primetime inventory is limited by its Major League Baseball commitments, but that could easily change before 2030.
And how long will the SEC tolerate its media rights payout being well behind its northern competition? Commissioner Greg Sankey agreed that the current ESPN deal is already undervalued, but added “I’d rather be overdelivering than underdelivering” in a comment one could see as referencing its rival. Will ESPN — whose deal lasts into the mid-2030s — put up enough cash to keep the SEC all in one place, or will the SEC be tempted to explore other partners and risk the same mistake the Big Ten has made?
