New Big Ten Media Deal To Impact Men’s and Women’s Basketball Broadcasting

While the Big Ten announced its record-breaking media rights deal with Fox, CBS, NBC and Peacock, concerns emerged among the conference’s basketball fans that the deal may lean too heavily on football.

The new media rights deal will take 47 men’s basketball games and 30 women’s basketball games and push them onto NBC’s streaming platform, Peacock. Although the games will not be televised on cable, Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith said that the conference’s basketball season will still carry the same exposure as it has in the past, but will just be presented in a new way.

“It won’t be hard, it will just be different. Fox is going to broadcast basketball games and CBS is going to broadcast basketball games,” Smith said. “It won’t be difficult to access, it will just be different. Those games that end up on Peacock, yes, for some people it will be different.”

Fox, CBS and Big Ten Network — which is an entity of Fox — will continue to host Big Ten regular season men’s basketball games, as they have in the past, however the Big Ten’s release did not mention the quantity of how many games will be placed on each network. CBS will televise the final two rounds of the Big Ten tournament, which it has done previously.

Flipping over to women’s basketball, the conference championship game will be nationally televised for the first time in 2023 and will appear on CBS.

All football and men’s and women’s basketball broadcasts on CBS will also be accessible through its streaming platform, Paramount+.

While the Big Ten’s new media deal cuts out the conference’s prior partnership with ESPN, Smith said it’s possible that Big Ten teams may still appear on the network from time-to-time.

“Obviously, Chris [Holtmann] and I had a great conversation about this. In our non-conference schedule, we’ll schedule games against teams whose television package is ESPN, ACC and SEC for example,” Smith said. “When we go there, we’ll still have a presence on ESPN. So there will be other schools in our league that do that naturally. I’m sure Tom [Izzo] at Michigan State will do the same. We’ll have a presence there, just probably not at home.”