Fox Sports and New Big East Are Teaming Up

But Fox Sports is showing enough passion to imagine that Rupert Murdoch, Fox’s head coach, will one day be spotted on campuses on fall Saturdays donning oversize mascot heads to predict the winners of the football games carried by his empire.

The levels of boola-boola in Fox’s bloodstream have been rising for years — one symptom was luring the play-by-play announcer Gus Johnson from CBS — but they are peaking now because of the start-up in mid-August of Fox Sports 1, an all-sports cable channel. Fox Sports executives laid out many of the network’s plans last week, but they did not discuss a deal with the Catholic 7 — the basketball universities that are seceding from the Big East — which is expected to be announced in a week or so.

The seven universities acquired the Big East name last week by leaving behind tens of millions of dollars in exit and entry fees that they would have received — had they not left — as a result of other universities’ comings-and-goings from the drastically realigned conference.

The new Big East will join a Fox Sports 1 college roster that features the Big 12, the Pacific-12 and Conference USA. Fox also owns 51 percent of the Big Ten Network, carries the Big Ten football championship game and alternates the Pac-12 football title game with ESPN.

The seven Catholic universities had privately voiced concerns that the Big East was changing to chase football cash; aware of the discontent, Fox last fall made clear its desire to talk to the group. The universities also knew that the terms of what essentially acted as a prenuptial agreement would let them leave the Big East as a unit, without paying exit fees, and make their own TV deal.

Fox won them over with a 12-year deal worth about $500 million, according to reports. But the contract could spike to $600 million if the conference grows to a dozen teams, according to two people briefed on the contract but not authorized to speak publicly about its terms. A number of universities are said to be candidates to join the new Big East, including Xavier, an Atlantic 10 member, and Creighton, of the Missouri Valley Conference.

ESPN, by contrast, will be paying the old Big East about $20 million annually to carry a conference featuring Connecticut, Cincinnati, Temple and South Florida — which are not leaving, for now — in addition to Navy (in football only) and a group of new, mostly Southern universities.

Football is the financial bell cow of college sports, but Fox chased the basketball-only conference for several reasons:

¶ Fox Sports 1 doesn’t need football, but basketball is the cream of the old Big East, especially as Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Louisville and Rutgers exit the conference.

¶ Basketball adds volume to Fox Sports 1 as it plans to make its debut Aug. 17 with as many as 90 million subscribers.

¶ The seven universities bring Fox history and rivalries, especially Georgetown, St. John’s, Seton Hall and Providence, four of the original seven Big East teams, and Villanova. (Marquette and DePaul are the sixth and seventh programs.)

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But as Fox has increased its devotion to college sports, it has not hung on to a major bowl position.

From 2007 to ’10, it carried the Bowl Championship Series on broadcast television.

But ESPN outbid Fox by nearly $100 million for the next four years and moved all the games to cable. The advertising recession forced Fox into a conservative bid, but it would have been more aggressive if Fox Sports 1 had existed to bring in subscriber revenue.

ESPN made deals recently to make certain that no one, including Fox, could get the B.C.S. games and the new B.C.S. playoff system until 2026.

Among the nearly three dozen bowl games, Fox shows only the Cotton Bowl. Last January, it was seen by an average of 11.9 million viewers, who watched Texas AM quarterback Johnny Manziel, the Heisman Trophy winner, amass 516 total yards in a 41-13 win over Oklahoma.

Triumphant as it was, the game did not prompt Murdoch to feed victory treats to Reveille, Texas AM’s collie mascot.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/sports/ncaabasketball/fox-sports-and-new-big-east-are-teaming-up.html?partner=rss&emc=rss