Duke’s splashy new rights deal with Prime Video has some major opposition from some perhaps unexpected sources, the Big Ten and Fox Sports.
Officials at the Big Ten and its primary broadcast partner Fox Sports are disputing the inclusion of next season’s Michigan-Duke men’s college basketball game in the Blue Devils’ first-of-its-kind rights deal with Amazon Prime Video, Ross Dellinger of Yahoo! Sports reported Friday.
Duke on Thursday announced a multi-year deal with Prime Video to stream three neutral site men’s basketball games per season, with this season’s slate including games against Michigan, UConn and Gonzaga. The location of the Michigan game would seem to be the core issue, as it is set to be played at Madison Square Garden in New York — which is “shared territory” for both the Big Ten and ACC.
According to Dellinger, the Big Ten and ACC previously agreed to alternate broadcast rights for neutral site games played in such “shared territory,” and Michigan and Duke played against each other last year in Washington D.C. — also shared territory — on ACC rightsholder ESPN. That would mean this year’s game would belong to the Big Ten and Fox.
The announcement of the Prime Video deal was met with “immediate pushback” from both the Big Ten and Fox, who have been in contact with the ACC and ESPN.
Duke received permission from the ACC and ESPN to sell rights to the non-conference package, agreeing to participate in ESPN’s owned and operated neutral site men’s basketball events in future seasons.
Dellinger reported Friday that there is no clear solution to the dispute, though it would seem from the reporting that the conflict could be fixed by simply relocating the game to another location. (For all of its recent expansion, the Big Ten does not yet have schools in Georgia or Florida, ACC states where any number of neutral site basketball games are routinely played).
There is precedent for Big Ten inventory being improperly awarded to another network. When the current Big Ten media rights deals were struck, then-Big Ten president Kevin Warren awarded NBC rights to this coming season’s football championship without the permission of Fox, which controls all Big Ten rights by way of its ownership of Big Ten Network. As reported by ESPN’s Pete Thamel in 2023, Big Ten schools had to compensate Fox to the tune of $40 million. (Fox bought back rights to that Big Ten title game from NBC earlier this year.) One could envision a similar resolution to the current conflict.
A notable undercurrent of this story is that Fox has been at the forefront of industry opposition to sporting events shifting from broadcast television to streaming. (It is almost certain that Fox would have carried Michigan-Duke on its broadcast network if it held the rights.) There is little doubt that Fox and the Big Ten would have been upset about losing inventory in any case, it may be more galling that Prime Video is the beneficiary.
