DALLAS (AP) - The Big 12 announced an agreement
Friday with ESPN and Fox Sports on a 13-year contract reportedly worth
$2.6 billion to televise football and men's basketball through 2024-25.
Financial terms weren't released, but ESPN cited anonymous sources in
reporting the contract was worth an average of $20 million per school
each year.
The deal will include games on ABC and all of the ESPN
platforms, including the Longhorn Network. ESPN said Fox Sports was also
part of the agreement.
"The stability of the Big 12 Conference is cemented," commissioner
Bob Bowlsby said in a statement. "We are positioned with one of the best
media rights arrangements in collegiate sports, providing the
conference and its members unprecedented revenue growth, and sports
programming over two networks."
ESPN said it will televise up to 19 conference-controlled football
games through 2015, then that number would increase to 23 starting in
2016. ESPN will have exclusive rights to the Big 12 basketball
tournament and will televise up to 105 games per season.
The TV deal was already in the works when Bowlsby, the former Stanford athletic director, was named commissioner in May.
It
came after two summers of uncertainty when it appeared that the Big 12
was on the brink of collapse. The conference lost four schools to three
other conferences, but the BCS league now seems secure for years to
come.
There are 10 schools in the league now. TCU and West Virginia began
play this season, offsetting the departures of Texas A&M and
Missouri to the SEC this year. Nebraska previously went to the Big Ten
and Colorado to the Pac-12.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
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