(12-06-2017 02:54 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(12-06-2017 02:30 PM)MissouriStateBears Wrote:  

(12-06-2017 02:21 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(12-06-2017 12:06 PM)lance99 Wrote:  

(12-06-2017 08:24 AM)BadgerMJ Wrote:  This sounds to me like a recipe for disaster if you're college sports.

If Fox is getting out of the regional sports game (combined with the up to know unknown status of their ownership in BTN) that would leave almost everything in the hands of ESPN. Makes me wonder if Fox will continue to be a player in college sports, ESPECIALLY college football.

How could ESPN having a stranglehold on the conference networks PLUS owning most of the rights to games be a good thing? If you think there's bias in coverage and reporting now, just wait until they're the only show in town.

IMHO, I do not see that happening. It would never make it through Anti-Trust. I know that Fox is willing to unload Channels, but the Mouse would have to give up something also. Now it makes sense why ESPN has been getting rid of people. That might be the Channel on the chopping block just to make this deal.....

I think FOX and ESPN both realized that they overpaid for the last Big 10 contract.

5 of the top 10 college football games were Big Ten games. They didn't overpay for it.

6 of the top 10 were SEC games, but that has nothing to do with whether or not they overpaid for those games. The ROI determines that. And as long as more entities bid for primary rights they will pay more. It doesn't destroy the motivation to broker rights or the motivation for interested parties who don't make college sports their primary business to prefer to buy their content from a provider like ESPN at rates where they have more flexibility and better content than if they bid.

Now, now. This has nothing to do with whether there was an "overpayment" for the Big Ten rights. If anything, if ESPN is buying the Fox RSNs, that means that they're doubling or even tripling down on justifying rights fees. In just a single example, Fox is under a $3 billion 20-year contract for *only* the Angels in *only* the Los Angeles market. Think about that: this is $150 million per year until the 2030s for a team that isn't even the top MLB franchise in its own market and whose TV viewership averages 62,000 households per game:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/...533b94204d

These local TV deals are actually quite huge across the board and every bit on par or even more than their national TV contract counterparts. They are almost all universally very long-term contracts (which, to be sure, is what those RSNs want because their existence is completely tied to having local team rights). Who knows what ESPN's long-term strategy will be with these RSNs, but rest assured that it's not to get away from rights fees. The rights fees for the Big Ten and SEC are actually rounding errors by comparison with the outstanding obligations that these RSNs have in all of their local contracts.