Reviving the partnership: What ESPN means for the BIG EAST

“We’re pleased to welcome the BIG EAST back to ESPN,” said Nick Dawson, ESPN senior vice president, programming & acquisitions. “This agreement returns one of the country’s premier conferences and its tradition of excellence to ESPN platforms. We look forward to this new chapter in our relationship with the BIG EAST.”

The streaming deal with ESPN+ complements the conference’s already-robust media rights agreement signed in 2024, which includes coverage on FOX Sports (FOX, FS1, FS2), NBC Sports (NBC, Peacock) and TNT Sports (TNT, TBS, truTV and Max). The addition of ESPN+ means that all women’s basketball regular season and conference tournament games will be available either on broadcast television or through streaming.

“We were able to significantly increase our national coverage under those major networks [last year],” BIG EAST Commissioner Val Ackerman told The Next. “For women’s basketball, we expect to have in the neighborhood of 65 women’s games [on broadcast television]. … There were rights left over that were not purchased by those three networks and so, over the last several months, we set about finding a home for a small package of men’s basketball games, the rest of our regular season women’s [basketball] games, and then what turned out to be a significant quantity of Olympic sport contests. And so that’s the package that fell to ESPN+.”

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Ackerman has past experience negotiating with ESPN. As the founding president of the WNBA, she helped ink the league’s media rights deal with ESPN for the league’s inaugural season in 1997, a partnership sustained to this day.

“To be on ESPN puts us in the company of the WNBA, other women’s college basketball properties, and then, of course, March Madness,” Ackerman told The Next. “And having been on the ground floor the WNBA relationship with ESPN, having seen what they’ve done in women’s college basketball over many years. … I think this will be a great match for us. We’re excited to get to work to figure out how we can be additive to their portfolio of high quality women’s basketball, and in turn, see how we can leverage their formidable capabilities to better promote our coaches and our players and our programs and our schools.”

The recent House v. NCAA settlement allows schools to begin paying their athletes directly, removing amateurism rules from major college sports. Athletes in the basketball-centric BIG EAST stand to benefit from revenue generated by their schools, including revenue from television rights deals.

“We don’t regulate how our schools spend the money. … They decide on a sport by sport basis,” Ackerman told The Next. ” … I suspect that some portion of of revenue from wherever source is going to be shared with student athletes in our league. Our revenue sharing is going to be principally directed to men’s and women’s basketball.”

Being a basketball-centric conference without football means that the majority of revenue earned by each school can be re-invested into men’s and women’s basketball players. This provides the conference with material advantages in the revenue share market against basketball programs within the four power conferences:, the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and SEC. The BIG EAST’s media rights deals with FOX, NBC, TNT and now, ESPN, stabilize the conference and its member institutions amidst the NCAA’s ground-shaking, rapid changes.

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“It does provide a very sound foundation for the conference,” Ackerman said, adding: “It just stands to reason that can only help us when we’re when we’re back on the street looking to see who we’re going to be lined up with in 2030, 2031-32, and beyond. So we’re really pleased with what this means today but also importantly what this means for us for tomorrow.”

When the BIG EAST chose in 1980 to partner with ESPN, an upstart media company that launched just months before, it was transformed from a regional basketball league into a national powerhouse. Now, 45 years later, their renewed relationship represents a confident step forward into a new era.