Until recently, Bob Thompson described himself as a “social media pariah.” Name the platform—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok—and it’s not on it.
But what better time to join, he thought last month, than recovering from shoulder surgery? The former television executive, who lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, has spent the past few weeks lying in bed with his arms in a sling.
So, as he did, he joined Twitter. He was in for a rude awakening.
“Gee,” he said, “I learned quickly that there are a lot of experts out there.”
Thompson’s new venture aligns perfectly with seismic timing in sports as the New Top Ten displays finalize the richest TV contract in industry history, estimated at around $1.2 billion annually. The timing is no coincidence. Thompson, president of the Fox Sports Network for a decade until he stepped down in 2009, was blown away by the multi-million media rights agreements that ultimately changed the landscape of college sports.
No TV deal is as attractive as commissioner one Kevin Warren & Co. gather in Chicago, where starting in 2024 three different networks are expected to acquire the rights to broadcast their league games in three different windows: Fox (afternoon), CBS (afternoon) and NBC (primetime). In a somewhat expected but still surprising move, the conference went without a World Leader in sport.
ESPN and ABC dropped out, and the world of college sports was blown away.
“It’s a shock,” Thompson said. “They’ve been together for 40 years.”
“It is surprising that ESPN is not part of a major partnership in collegiate sports,” said one of the administrators of the Power 5 conference. “It has shock value.”
Former Fox Sports president Bob Thompson, pictured here in 2005, was one of the sports media figures who were fascinated by the Big Ten moving on from ESPN.
“Odd”, “unbelievable” and “risky” are the words industry stakeholders use to describe the split of a four-decade-old partnership between the country’s top sports network and, arguably, its richest collegiate sports conference. The ESPN-Top Ten marriage began in ESPN’s third year of existence, and the relationship with ABC is even older. In 1966, the network nationally broadcast Michigan State’s 10–10 game with Notre Dame—the first college football game to be broadcast in Hawaii and for troops overseas in Vietnam.
While the conference said the deal was not finalized, an announcement was expected as early as next week.
In a move that signals a shift in college sports towards television revenue and away from old traditions, the split is expected to have far-reaching repercussions, notably freeing up TV space and money for Pac-12 and Big 12, both of which media rights agreements expire over the next two years. “It was a very good day for those two conferences,” said Thompson, who believes ESPN wants at least one part of each league.
Like many others, Thompson believes that the inclusion of the Top Ten from NBC ensures the independence of Notre Dame, something his own athletic director suggested to reporters Wednesday. The Irish, as expected, don’t appear to be in a rush to join any league and are now inclined to use the new market rates to mine NBC for more cash.
Thompson said NBC’s new role with the Top Ten now gives Notre Dame the opportunity to “marry” its game to its weekly Top Ten game on a stretch of high-level college football action on a network that has for so long remained largely outside the sport. “NBC will try to make Saturday night college football like the NFL Sunday night,” Thompson said. “It’s a big show.”
ESPN’s divorce from the Top Ten is another wave in the sea of change that is sweeping collegiate athletics. The network broadcasts 27 football games and 80 men’s basketball games a year. It partners with two leagues to operate the ACC–Big Ten Challenge, an annual basketball event that began in 1999 and is now coming to an end.
There’s a nostalgia part here. College football Saturdays often begin with a Top Ten game on ABC or ESPN or both. “It was a right to turn on the TV at 11 [middle] and see Northwestern and Indiana,” said one Big 12 administrator. “It was like ‘O.K., the day has begun!’”
ESPN’s promotional power in sport is undeniable. It remains the only national all-sports network 24 hours, seven days a week, across multiple platforms. The network broadcasts about 90% of bowling games and owns the exclusive rights to the College Football Playoffs and ranking events much raved about by the CFP Selection Committee.
ESPN’s influence is such that one of the conference commissioners said, “It’s surprising that the Top Ten wouldn’t take a few dollars less and stay with ESPN.”
Group 5’s athletic director called the Top Ten decision a “bad move” and compared it to Big East basketball which lost its relevance after leaving ESPN. “While you can’t ignore the State of Ohio, you don’t break up with ESPN more than a few million a year,” the AD said. “It’s not worth it.”
Ultimately, money is the sticking point, sources tell Sports Illustrated. The network decided not to bid on CBS for the afternoon slot and refused to fulfill the Top Ten package for prime-time TV windows. The prime-time plan—seven years at $380 million per year—covers roughly half of the inventory (13 to 14 Top Ten games) the network currently has. The network didn’t feel it was worth it for such a high price, especially considering their new SEC deal.
Starting in 2024, the league is paying the SEC about $300 million per year for the conference’s top games. Space is a bit limited. ESPN also has a major deal with ACC, along with another contract with the Group 5 conference. “Half more games for double the money, that puts everyone off,” Thompson said.
The Top Ten without ESPN wouldn’t have seen this type of promotion on the sport’s flagship network in the past, most agree.
An athletics administrator at the SEC school said: “Got to know that GameDay won’t be showing up at Top Ten games very often. You have to think they won’t be spending too much time in the Top Ten. It will be interesting to see.”
From a recruiting perspective, this is a concern for several coaches in the league, said a Top Ten administrator. But it’s not as worrying as it was a few years ago. “Five years ago, they would have been terrified,” said the administrator.
And now? While not having ESPN would be a “weird” and adjustment, modern-day youths consume less content on SportsCenter as they do on their phones, most notably via social media channels.
The overshadowing part of this situation is men’s basketball. About 80 games at a time on ESPN have to find a home, and it’s not easy, Thompson said. He expected CBS to pick up a few games, but wondered, “Is FS1 improving? Did NBC get a part with Peacock? ”
From the start, ESPN was at a disadvantage in the Top Ten negotiations, some believe, due to what experts say is the unusual involvement of broadcasting rivals. Fox representatives are at a Big Ten media rights meeting with other networks, a sign of how integral the network is in decisions.
“It is not unusual for them to take part in every discussion,” said one college official. “Fox and ESPN have clearly been at odds.”
The latest conference realignment moves come at the behest of two networks, many within the sport believe. Each of them is closely linked to the two giants of college football—the SEC (ESPN) and the Big Ten (Fox)—and now each owns most of their TV rights.
Thompson, however, disagrees with the theory. First, conference commissioners and administrators ultimately make decisions in media rights negotiations, he said. And second, Fox and ESPN both need a healthy FBS—not a two-conference giant that resembles the NFL. The current two 16-team conferences don’t cover the market enough, though that may change eventually.
“That might happen in the future, but I believe it will be closer to two 24-team leagues,” he said. “For both networks, it is important that ACC, Pac-12 and Big 12 remain strong.”
Pac-12 is in the midst of a second exclusive negotiating window with ESPN and Fox, extending its original window until completion of a Top Ten deal. The league seeks to secure its 10 members with strong media rights contracts. While ESPN’s exit from the Top Ten is a positive for the league, the lack of competition is a negative.
CBS and NBC seem unlikely to partner now that they’re with the Big Ten. And Fox’s situation is complicated. The network is partnered with a league that recently went after two of the biggest Pac-12 brands at USC and UCLA.
So who’s going to bid against ESPN for a West Coast league whose games usually start after 9pm. ET?
One thing ESPN won’t do is pay more, said a college football official who has been involved in negotiations with the network. ESPN will use its influence and value—“We own all the sports talk shows!”—as a tool to keep numbers low, he said.
“Be aware of this,” said a retired college administrator with a long history of negotiating against the network. “ESPN is tough, and if there’s no competition, you don’t want to be in that environment.”
For the Top Ten, the environment worked well. The league devised what many say is a brilliant plan to bid for three separate TV windows with a view to negotiating each separately and the goal of partnering with three different networks for a period of six to seven years—half the length of the ESPN SEC agreed. This ultimately results in significant paydays for the Big Ten schools, which are estimated to be around $80 million to $90 million per year in distribution.
Another bonus for the Top Ten is a cross-promotion ad never seen before in collegiate sports. Imagine Fox, CBS, and NBC all promoting their own Top Ten fights and each other during their NFL Sunday broadcasts?
“Having three seeded networks is unusual,” Thompson said. “From a Big Ten point of view, having three windows with three networks on every Saturday in this era of cutting cables is a great achievement.”
It’s all good for collegiate sports, says Oliver Luck, former director of college athletics and NCAA executive.
“Take a 50,000-foot view,” he said. “If you care about college football, you want as many big broadcasters as possible to spend as much money as possible.”
One such broadcast network, CBS, has left many people confused. The network has one of the best TV packages in American sports history, owning the SEC’s top game for about $55 million a year in deals that expire next season. In 2020, the network pulled out of a bidding war with ESPN in negotiations to extend the package. And now, two years later, CBS is paying about $50 million more for the second Big Ten game than ESPN for the SEC’s top game?
Those in the college sports and TV industries say CBS misread the market during the SEC negotiations, not expecting media rights to spike in the same way that college football coach salaries have risen so quickly.
“The SEC is the best product outside the NFL,” said a conference administrator. “You have paid more for second and maybe third tier Top Ten products and you are against the items you gave?”
Over the years, many believed CBS’s relationship with the SEC had deteriorated. Even when the league expanded to add Texas A&M and Missouri, the network refused to increase its payout to the conference even though it was so low. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that Mike [Slive] and Greg [Sankey] aren’t happy with CBS. They want more,” said a former conference administrator who knew the situation well.
With the Big Ten deal just commencing in 2023, CBS will have a year in which it owns the rights to the second tier game of the Top Ten as well as the top SEC game—an interesting crossover difficulty. The SEC’s contract with CBS requires its games to be aired exclusively by the network at 3:30 p.m. ET.
The Top Ten deal will be structured in such a way as to allow CBS to fulfill SEC duties in the first year of the contract, a source told SI, though details were not provided.
Meanwhile, in Scottsdale, when he’s not tweeting through his recovery from shoulder surgery, Thompson is playing golf. In addition, he also acts as a television network consultant, so he must stay involved in industry news, most of which can be found on Twitter.
That’s part of why he ended his social media ban, joined the social media platform and now finds himself having over 1,000 followers. He posted nearly 200 tweets, many of them about ongoing media rights stories across the college landscape. In one tweet, hours before word broke that ESPN had pulled out of the Top Ten negotiations, Thompson predicted that Saturday’s new Top Ten football would include three games on Fox/FS1, one game on CBS and one to two games on ESPN.
Said a laughing Thompson a few days later: “So much for that prediction!”
As of this week, even the true experts on Twitter were shocked.
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