What the Duke/Amazon/ESPN/B1G story means, and doesn't mean

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May is normally a little bit early for men’s basketball schedule announcements, but Duke dropped one a few days ago that managed to steal headlines in a way that “P4 team will play host Incarnate Word on Nov 18th” usually doesn’t.

Duke will play three high-profile neutral site games next season: against UConn in Las Vegas on Nov. 25, against defending national champ Michigan at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 21, and Gonzaga on Feb. 20 in Detroit, according to ESPN.

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That alone would be newsworthy, as Duke, Michigan and UConn are likely to be among the three highest ranked teams in the beginning of the year. But the really unique thing about these games is who is supposed to broadcast them. Amazon.

Per the ESPN story:

Amazon has nibbled at various live sports broadcast deals, broadcasting select NFL and NBA games, for example, but hasn’t outright taken over any major professional or college broadcast contracts. This series would be the first major college broadcast for Amazon.

Now, there are a few teensy potential problems here.

For one, these games aren’t technically Duke’s to sell. Duke, as a member of the ACC, signed over the broadcast rights for all of their home conference and out-of-conference events to the league’s broadcast partner, ESPN. For neutral sites, the broadcast rights are generally negotiated, depending on who the “home” team is for the event. In this case, it appears that ESPN, (who would normally have the rights for at least some of these games, if not all), agreed to allow Amazon to broadcast these three neutral sites games in exchange for Duke committing to participating in a certain number of ESPN-owned events over the next two seasons.

The Big Ten, however, believes that one of those games wasn’t actually Duke, or ESPN’s, game to sell. Via Yahoo!:

Intellectual property lawyer David McKenzie argues here that a) the Big Ten can’t claim ‘ownership’ of these broadcasts and b) ESPN’s decision to allow the Amazon sublicense is partly because Disney wants to stress test the idea of whether college sports programming can justify paywalled broadcasts. His full tweet is worth a read, but this perhaps the main takeaway:

The Duke-Amazon arrangement is being described as a turning point for college sports media. My honest guess is that it's more of a market test, structured by a rights holder who needed information from a 200M+ subscriber base more than it needed three basketball games. It's now being resisted by a competitor who cannot afford to be that patient. The law explains how the deal got done. The strategy explains why ESPN wanted it done this way. And the B1G's complaint, stripped of its proprietary language, is the complaint of a conference that wishes it had thought of it first.

I don’t have a strong opinion yet as to who would prevail in a legal dispute between the Big Ten, ESPN and Amazon. I don’t have access to the exact language in the ACC media rights deal or in any previous agreement between the ACC and Big Ten over neutral site broadcast “ownership”. The previous copy of the ACC media rights deal, obtained by former Florida AG Pam Bondi during the Florida State/ACC legal battle, is too redacted to provide any useful context on this particular point, in my opinion.

I am, however, skeptical of any claims that Duke negotiating a limited carve-up of their non-conference men’s basketball rights package means that other schools will leap to do the same thing…or even could.

As a reminder, schools do not have the authority to unilaterally pursue these sorts of licenses, because they (with few exceptions) don’t actually own the broadcast rights to their games. Their conference does, which they then sell to ESPN, Fox, etc.

Often, schools will have the rights to more inventory than the primary rightsholder actually wants, especially for events like college baseball, softball or wrestling. It isn’t uncommon for leagues to secure sub-licensing packages for some of those games with companies like FloSports, or sometimes, even school websites.

But there’s a huge difference between sublicensing a mid-week Penn State/Indiana State baseball game, (which, no offense to either school, isn’t going to be worth very much as a single entity), and say, a Big Ten football game. There’s a reason USC’s attempt to move their football game to Netflix was met with such dramatic pushback from the Big Ten. The Big Ten’s broadcast partners paid a lot of money to broadcast events like Notre Dame/USC, and they had no interest in letting somebody else get that privilege.

So in order for the Duke strategy to be scaled, you’d need to find other examples of schools that have sufficient fanbase and brand to justify streaming (or other broadcaster) interest, and events that aren’t so large that the actual rightsholder wouldn’t balk at a sublicense.

I don’t think that’s a large list. My gut is that it would be almost exclusively men’s or women’s basketball, centering around either international events, large-scale MTEs (like the Players Era) or events featuring Big 12 or ACC teams as the primary program. I could hypothetically see a world, for example, where Kansas or North Carolina could pull off a similar arrangement. It’s harder for me to see the math working out for Texas, Kentucky, Alabama, or any Big Ten team.

It’s certainly better for conferences if Amazon decided to move from “theoretical major broadcast partner” to “actual broadcast partner”, creating another possible bidder for major broadcast rights as we head into the next round of league TV deals in the 2030s. It’ll be harder for leagues to secure larger and larger paydays if only two, maybe three broadcasters represent the only serious potential bidders, after all. I figure this type of series is a chance for Amazon to get better market data before deciding how seriously they want to chase basketball rights in the future.

Is it better for players? I guess, if we consider that Amazon will reportedly have some sort of NIL component that could then be re-routed to the athletes without counting against the CSC “Salary Cap.” But I’m personally not ready to spend too much digital ink (or real world brain cells) worrying about the cap until a school is actually punished for circumventing the cap. Until that happens, I am operating on the assumption that CSC cap regulations are closer to the scoring rules for Who’s Line Is It Anyway than they are to say, the NBA CBA.

That is to say, they’re made up and don’t actually matter.

Is it better for consumers? Probably not, unless you already have a Prime subscription. But hey, what’s one more paid subscription to sign up for in order to watch all of your favorite games?

Amazon is betting that you’ll complain, but at the end of the day, you’ll still watch. In a few months, I guess we’ll see if they’re right.