Next year’s Big Ten football championship is back where it originally began.
Fox Sports is acquiring next year’s Big Ten football championship game from NBC for between $45-55 million, Joe Flint of The Wall Street Journal reported on social media Tuesday. NBC had been shopping rights to the game, the only Big Ten Championship it was to air as part of its rights deal with the conference, with Amazon long believed to be the main — perhaps even sole — contender.
Per Flint, NBC will receive an additional regular season game as compensation.
In selling rights to Fox, NBC essentially rectified an error made when the Big Ten media rights deal was being negotiated. According to reporting by ESPN’s Pete Thamel in 2023, NBC obtained the 2026 title game after then-Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren awarded the network rights 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 by the Big Ten.
Now, Fox has reacquired rights to a game it should have never lost, though it ultimately will end up paying at least $5-15 million — the cost of the sale subtracted by the amount it was compensated — for the privilege.
It is not clear whether NBC had to compensate Fox at all for the error, but if so, the network has made back those funds and then some. At the high end, selling that single Big Ten football game could pay back a full quarter of NBC’s annual Major League Baseball rights fee.
NBC’s desire to offload the Big Ten title game is the latest evidence that television ratings are not everything in this industry. Last year’s Indiana-Ohio State Big Ten Championship, pitting the nation’s two highest ranked schools, averaged 18.3 million viewers on FOX — not only the largest audience ever for the game, but the largest ever for any conference title game (though the latter superlative is solely because of Nielsen methodological changes that skew comparisons to prior years).
There is only one other Big Ten title game under the current rights deal set for a network other than FOX — the 2028 game on CBS.
It should be noted that in apparently prevailing over Amazon, Fox prevented the streamer from making its biggest foray into college football broadcasting. Prime Video has yet to carry any collegiate sporting events of note. Fox Corporation is among those pleading with the federal government to in some way prevent broadcast networks from losing sports content to streamers.
