- Disney (ESPN) has had, for decades, a policy. To the extent it is possible, if ESPN doesn’t have rights to that league, it does not get mentioned. Yes, they have to cover some big things, like the NCAA basketball or who won the World Series, but regular day in day out stuff just get ignored. Ex: NHL for 20 years. Now, I haven’t watched Sports Center in years, but people do, and it does matter.
- CBS made a H U G E mistake. It walked away from a similar priced deal with the SEC, which will now be 100% on the Disney networks, and then realized it had nothing to show on Saturdays in the fall and got in with the Big 10. The Big 10 will be crushed in the ratings by the SEC, every week.
In 2021, 5 of the top 10 games in TV ratings were BIG games (or nonconference games where the BIG team was the home team) compared to 3 for the SEC and 2 for the ACC, so your claim about getting crushed in the ratings does not hold water.
The SEC has some very premium conference matchups, but their teams are afraid of playing farther north than Lexington so they have very few non-conference games to supplement that. Florida-FSU has lost its luster, Georgia-Ga Tech and Clemson-Scar have become very one-sided and nobody more than 20 miles from Kentucky's borders care about UK-UL.
In all of CBS' years of showing SEC games, they featured exactly one game with a team farther north than Lexington and that was Notre Dame at Georgia, because Georgia is apparently the only SEC team not afraid of going north (though they insisted that the game in South Bend be in September when the weather is better).
So, no, CBS is not going to suffer a bit by swapping out the SEC for the BIG.
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