RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. \u2014 Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel is confident his men\u2019s basketball program will face Duke on Amazon Prime next season. Still, officially, it remains unresolved with the Big Ten, its media rights partners and the two powerhouse programs.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re working through it,\u201d Manuel told reporters at the Big Ten meetings this week. \u201cI think it\u2019ll be fine. What I\u2019m looking forward to is playing the game.\u201d<\/p>\n
The neutral-site contest, scheduled for Madison Square Garden in New York City, falls into ambiguous territory for the Big Ten and its teams regarding media rights contracts. For decades, basketball programs have participated in games or multi-team events organized by third-party groups at neutral sites. Those third-party hosts sell viewing rights to individual networks or streaming sites.<\/p>\n
However, Michigan and Duke met last year in Washington, D.C., with the Blue Devils designated as the home team, which allowed the game to air on ESPN as part of the ACC\u2019s media rights package.<\/p>\n
With the teams playing in a second consecutive season, a traditional contract, even at a neutral site, would call for Michigan \u2014 and the Big Ten \u2014 to retain those viewing rights. The Big Ten has media rights deals with Fox, CBS and NBC, and any of those networks would desire to broadcast a high-profile matchup between the national champion Wolverines and Duke. Amazon Prime set up a three-game contract with Duke, and Michigan is slated to be one of those three matchups.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy staff said they made sure that everybody understood that it needed to go through Big Ten, and they had our media rights,\u201d Manuel said. \u201cWhat I didn\u2019t know \u2014 and it\u2019s fine \u2014 and they didn\u2019t necessarily need to disclose, but I was surprised when it became three games that they were putting together.\u201d<\/p>\n
For some multi-team events, the programs pay a group as much as $100,000 to participate, and the games sometimes appear on streaming-only services. The Big Ten has frowned upon many third-party basketball deals, especially those involving its highly visible programs.<\/p>\n
\u201cFortunately for us, because of our brand, we\u2019re going to be playing on major networks regardless; we\u2019re going to be playing it at prime time slots,\u201d Michigan coach Dusty May said. \u201cFor us, it\u2019s selecting the ones that make the most sense for Michigan, for our opponent, for our leagues and also the overall enterprise of college basketball.\u201d<\/p>\n
When the Big Ten Network debuted in 2007, the membership pledged non-national, third-tier television rights to the league. Initially, that was costly to programs like Indiana and Iowa, which had robust statewide networks. Now, the Big Ten\u2019s media rights package is the most lucrative among the conferences, with the league disbursing $1.37 billion<\/a> to its membership, according to its 2025 fiscal year tax return.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a big believer that you want the strengths in the league,\u201d Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said. \u201cWhere I sit in the conference office, what you care about is, are you providing the partners that are creating a lot of value for you, are you providing them with the best inventory? And that\u2019s the way we want to approach it.<\/p>\n \u201cWe believe that we can create more events, and we believe that we don\u2019t need third parties to do that. That\u2019s basically a function of a conference office creating events. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a crazy thing to be able to do, but we\u2019ve shown we can do it. We played hockey at Wrigley. We\u2019re looking at a neutral site wrestling tournament for the first time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. \u2014 Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel is confident his men\u2019s basketball program will face…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655188,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[7091,399,2663,1777,398,396,397,99,1794],"class_list":["post-655187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-duke-blue-devils","tag-football","tag-mens-college-basketball","tag-michigan-wolverines","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-sports","tag-sports-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}