The WBD-NBA Settlement’s Ripple Effect on College Sports

The landmark settlement between Warner Bros. Discovery and the NBA over the league’s new media-rights package has yielded a college sports development: the Big 12 on TNT.

As part of the settlement, ESPN will sublicense 13 football games and 15 men’s basketball games per year to Warner Bros. Discovery, Front Office Sports confirmed. Beginning in 2025, the deal will span the lifetime of the Big 12’s six-year, $2.28 billion package with ESPN and Fox.

WBD and the NBA have been embroiled in a dispute for months, ever since the NBA announced its new 11-year, $77 billion deals with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon in the summer. The announcement seemed to mark the end of a four-decade relationship between the NBA and TNT, but WBD sued the league, alleging it had matched Amazon’s offer and that the NBA had breached their contract by agreeing to the Amazon deal.

The settlement, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by FOS on Saturday, allows TNT’s Inside the NBA to live on. TNT will still produce and maintain “complete editorial control” of the show, but it will be aired on ESPN, sources told FOS senior writer Michael McCarthy. TNT was able to score a package of 100 internationally broadcast regular-season games, which will air in Latin America and Northern Europe.

With Inside headed from TNT to ESPN, college football and basketball games are heading the other way.

The move will provide the Big 12 even more reach: All of the games previously would have been streaming only, aired on ESPN+, but will now be aired on WBD’s linear platforms of TNT and/or TBS, a source confirmed. However, ESPN and Fox are still considered the league’s main broadcast partners.

The NBA was a tremendously valuable property for TNT for years. Without it, TNT is adding a series of other sports, including French Open tennis, Unrivaled women’s basketball, and NASCAR. But the biggest move is wading deeper into college sports; since 2023, WBD has been amassing big-time college sports media rights. The settlement has given the network an opportunity to expand that portfolio with power conference regular-season football and arguably the top-ranked basketball conference in the country.

For more than a decade, the network’s only major college sports property was a portion of men’s March Madness. But in May, the network did a sublicensing deal with ESPN for College Football Playoff games. TNT will broadcast two first-round games of the expanded Playoff beginning this year, and it will add two quarterfinals starting in 2026. TNT also signed a deal to broadcast Mountain West football games, as well as a slice of Big East basketball starting in 2025 as part of the league’s new media package with Fox and NBC. The network has the rights to early-season men’s basketball tournaments like The Players Era Festival as well.

Now, TNT and its parent WBD have sublicensed their way into some of the biggest college football and basketball rights in the NCAA.