The Pac-12 will receive about $3 billion over 12 years by selling most of its top football and basketball games to Fox and ESPN - the richest deal ever for a college conference - sources confirmed Tuesday.
Meanwhile the conference will organize its own cable-TV network to begin in 2012.
Cal, Stanford and the other 10 conference schools stand to make about $21 million a year from the new deal, which was first reported by the New York Times. It is worth about $250 million per year, more than quadrupling the current deal with ESPN and Fox.
Under the Pac-10's current $60 million deal, each school received only about $6 million, and the number varied greatly depending on how many of its football games were shown.
Pac-10 Commissioner Larry Scott, whose conference becomes the Pac-12 with the addition of Colorado and Utah on July 1, will announce the agreements Wednesday at the conference meetings in Phoenix.
In starting its own network, the Pac-12 will follow the lead of the Big Ten, which created its own network in 2007 and also negotiated a 10-year, $1 billion deal with ESPN.
Unlike the Big Ten Network, of which Fox has a 49 percent stake, the Pac-12 Network will be owned solely by the conference.
"We didn't feel we had to give equity to get the broadcast and cable packages we got," Scott told the Times.
The new deal is a major coup for Scott, the former pro tennis player and former head of the Women's Tennis Association whom the Pac-10 hired in 2009 to succeed the retiring Tom Hansen.
The Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and the ACC all have landed TV contracts in recent years. The numbers were impressive. For instance, the Big 12's new deal with Fox is worth $1.2 billion. But the Pac-12 deal has trumped them all.
Being last put the Pac-12 in the driver's seat in a bidding contest among ESPN, Fox and Comcast/NBC, which was hoping to raise the profile of its Versus channel.
Under the new deal, as outlined by the Times and confirmed by other sources, the conference's football games will be shown on ABC (like ESPN, a Disney property) and Fox - five of them in prime time each season - as well as on ESPN's various networks and FX. Basketball will be shown on the ESPN networks and Fox Sports Net. A package of the conference's so-called Olympic sports will be shown on ESPN.
In recent years, Comcast Sports Net has contracted with Fox to show football and basketball in the Bay Area on CSNBA and CSNCA. That relationship presumably will continue in the new deal.
ESPN and Fox will rotate the newly created Pac-12 football championship game, and the basketball tournament will alternated between the ESPN networks and Fox and FX.
The vast majority of the conference's sports programming, except for football and men's basketball, will wind up on the new Pac-12 Network as well as a digital outlet to be created, according to reports. The Pac-12 Network will have to work out deals with existing cable and satellite distributors, but Scott told the Times his conference could follow the template of the successful Big Ten Network.
"They did a lot of things wonderfully and successfully," he said. "They were pioneers. They were forthcoming with us. But when you're the second to do it, you get to draft behind the first one."
Officials at Cal and Stanford declined to discuss the new TV deal until it was officially announced.
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Originally Posted by cdj
Exactly!
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