Inside the SEC TV deal and expansion timing

[TigerHorn 1,351]

This article is the best breakdown to date I've seen at how the SEC TV deal works, and the potential for short term deals with CBS and Fox to accelerate the move for the Horns and Sooners. Sankey knew what he was doing. Excerpt:

Huddling with his lead advisors, Sankey sought a guarantee from ESPN that if the conference expanded in the future, he’d have the ability to pay the new teams the same amount of money, pro rata, that his 14 current teams were already guaranteed. But why would ESPN sign a deal that gave Sankey and the SEC equal money for all expansion candidates, regardless of their quality? The SEC and ESPN needed to define the field of potential expansion candidates in a way that made both sides comfortable with the expanded version of their deal.

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The opportunity is there, thanks to the master negotiation stroke back in December of 2019. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey wasn’t just negotiating for the deal in front of him. Like all good negotiators, he was thinking about the next deal too. And now the next deal is here.

And already paid for.

So when will Oklahoma and Texas begin play in the SEC? Right now, that’s partially determined by CBS, which controls the SEC’s game of the week until the end of the 2024 football season. But there’s already discussion that a deal might be made. What if ESPN got the SEC’s game of the week starting in 2022 and in exchange for that game coming to ESPN early, ESPN gave CBS the second best SEC game for several years? With Texas and Oklahoma now in the fold, the second best SEC game is a valuable proposition. The same thing could be true with Fox Sports and any claim they have on Texas and Oklahoma games going forward as a part of their Big 12 deal, might Fox want to air SEC games as well? In theory this could be an additional masterstroke for Sankey and the SEC. They’d have three networks promoting their games instead of one in the short term.