BleedGopher
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Per ESPN:
When the Big Ten officially introduced Tony Petitti as its new commissioner nearly a month ago, he listed four immediate priorities in his role as one of the most powerful people in college sports.
The league needs to integrate USC and UCLA for the 2024-25 season, explore the new media rights deal for the expanded College Football Playoff and focus on the tricky issue of name, image and likeness.
Lastly, Petitti prioritized the official completion of the massive television contract worth more than $7 billion negotiated by his predecessor, Kevin Warren. This issue may have seemed like a mere formality, but complications to the much-celebrated deal arose soon after he accepted the job.
Nearly three months before the season kicks off and those TV deals begin, the Big Ten does not have completed longform contracts, which include the fine print details. Instead, Petitti is engaged in significant "horse trading," according to multiple sources, to get the NBC primetime deal finished and figure out what the network calls "outstanding issues" in order to uphold as much value as possible.
"These deals aren't done, and they aren't what they were represented to be from the standpoint of the NBC deal and the availability of all members to participate in November games in primetime," said an industry source.
Interviews with nearly a dozen sources in and around the Big Ten and the college sports industry paint a picture of Petitti sprinting to navigate details left unresolved from his predecessor.
As a result, there's a trail of unhappy athletic directors seeing money disappearing from their bottom line, frustrated television executives and big-name coaches irked about the lack of transparency in details that weren't communicated to them.
Kevin Warren took over as Big Ten commissioner in January 2020, and in just three years at the helm, he dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic, helped bring USC and UCLA into the conference in a landscape-altering deal, and secured the massive TV payday before heading back to the NFL as team president and CEO of the Chicago Bears.
When he accepted that job, he said he was leaving the Big Ten in a "demonstratively better position," which was true financially as its schools project more revenue than any league over the course of the deal. His work adding USC and UCLA, who join the conference after the 2023-24 season, was widely praised by members and provided a financial jolt to the television deal.
On campus, it's a bit more muddled. Big Ten schools have seen potential revenue disappear the past few months from a contract that was announced back in August as being worth an average of nearly $1 billion per year through the 2029 football season. More than $70 million in total is suddenly in flux -- nearly $5 million per school -- and it has left administrators around the league seeking answers and calling for financial accountability.
Recently, schools have found out:
www.espn.com
Go Gophers!!
When the Big Ten officially introduced Tony Petitti as its new commissioner nearly a month ago, he listed four immediate priorities in his role as one of the most powerful people in college sports.
The league needs to integrate USC and UCLA for the 2024-25 season, explore the new media rights deal for the expanded College Football Playoff and focus on the tricky issue of name, image and likeness.
Lastly, Petitti prioritized the official completion of the massive television contract worth more than $7 billion negotiated by his predecessor, Kevin Warren. This issue may have seemed like a mere formality, but complications to the much-celebrated deal arose soon after he accepted the job.
Nearly three months before the season kicks off and those TV deals begin, the Big Ten does not have completed longform contracts, which include the fine print details. Instead, Petitti is engaged in significant "horse trading," according to multiple sources, to get the NBC primetime deal finished and figure out what the network calls "outstanding issues" in order to uphold as much value as possible.
"These deals aren't done, and they aren't what they were represented to be from the standpoint of the NBC deal and the availability of all members to participate in November games in primetime," said an industry source.
Interviews with nearly a dozen sources in and around the Big Ten and the college sports industry paint a picture of Petitti sprinting to navigate details left unresolved from his predecessor.
As a result, there's a trail of unhappy athletic directors seeing money disappearing from their bottom line, frustrated television executives and big-name coaches irked about the lack of transparency in details that weren't communicated to them.
Kevin Warren took over as Big Ten commissioner in January 2020, and in just three years at the helm, he dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic, helped bring USC and UCLA into the conference in a landscape-altering deal, and secured the massive TV payday before heading back to the NFL as team president and CEO of the Chicago Bears.
When he accepted that job, he said he was leaving the Big Ten in a "demonstratively better position," which was true financially as its schools project more revenue than any league over the course of the deal. His work adding USC and UCLA, who join the conference after the 2023-24 season, was widely praised by members and provided a financial jolt to the television deal.
On campus, it's a bit more muddled. Big Ten schools have seen potential revenue disappear the past few months from a contract that was announced back in August as being worth an average of nearly $1 billion per year through the 2029 football season. More than $70 million in total is suddenly in flux -- nearly $5 million per school -- and it has left administrators around the league seeking answers and calling for financial accountability.
Recently, schools have found out:
- They are going to have to pay back nearly $40 million to Fox because, according to sources, Warren delivered NBC the Big Ten football title game in 2026 without the full authority to do so. This all has unfolded under the complicated backdrop of the Big Ten conference not actually controlling the rights to the inventory of this latest deal -- the Big Ten Network does, which is majority owned by Fox. (More on that below.)
- They are going to have to pay $25 million total for a deal to pay Fox back for lost 2020 football game inventory. This came after an arrangement between Fox and the conference that was unable to muster the lost revenue from the COVID-19 season.
- There's tens of millions of dollars of value of the NBC primetime deal in flux, as Petitti has been racing to ensure it keeps as much of its original value as possible. Historically in the Big Ten, after the first weekend in November, schools were not required to play night games for myriad reasons -- health, recovery and campus logistics among them. These were known in league circles as "tolerances," and prior television contracts accounted for them.
How an unfinished TV deal led to an unexpectedly hectic first month for the new Big Ten commissioner
New Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti has been sprinting to finish his league's massive TV deal -- and key athletic directors and coaches aren't happy with the details.
www.espn.com
Go Gophers!!
