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ESPN’s ambitions to launch a college football RedZone could be missing a major piece of the puzzle.
Fox Sports is unlikely to license its Big Ten or Big 12 games to ESPN for the potential package as it would cannibalize its own offerings, multiple industry sources told Front Office Sports. Fox would require significant ownership in the venture to have any willingness to participate, a source said.
Spokespeople for Fox and ESPN declined to comment.
Fox airs a weekly Big Noon game on Saturdays with its best Big Ten or Big 12 game of the week, and also jointly owns Big Ten Network with the conference. ESPN would also need CBS and NBC on board if it wanted full Big Ten rights. Fox, CBS, and NBC collectively pay the Big Ten about $1 billion per year for game rights. (In addition to the SEC and its split Big 12 rights, ESPN has most of the rights to ACC football.)
It’s the latest development in a yearslong battle between Fox and ESPN for supremacy over big-time college football.
In 2019, Fox launched Big Noon Kickoff to compete with ESPN’s College GameDay. GameDay later added firepower with Nick Saban and Pat McAfee, and this season Big Noon is adding Dave Portnoy and Barstool Sports.
They now both have controlling broadcast stakes in the two “super conferences” of the SEC and Big Ten. In recent years, the SEC—for which ESPN now has exclusive rights—added Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12, where ESPN and Fox share rights. Then, the Big Ten nabbed USC and UCLA (and later Oregon and Washington) from the Pac-12, where ESPN and Fox previously shared rights before the conference collapsed.
Fox bankrolled the additions of Oregon and Washington, FOS reported at the time. The Big Ten, which works closely with Fox, had also exited its long-standing partnership with ESPN in favor of new deals with CBS and NBC in 2023.
The RedZone question is still a ways off. ESPN is slated to acquire the trademark from the NFL as part of the pact to assume control of NFL Network, but the deal is not expected to close for at least a year.
