The Big East contract with FOX is coming to a close after the 2025 season, and the conference is currently in a negotiating window with the broadcaster to renew the pact going forward. It’s probably the biggest story on or off the court for anyone that likes of follows the Big East.
The biggest source of revenue for the conference, that ultimately gets passed along to the individual programs, is media revenue, primarily from the FOX contract signed way back in 2013. Last season, that amounted to nearly $50M, a significant jump due to having a full set of game inventory for the first time since 2019. (More on that here.)
And with TV revenue ballooning for fottball-first conferences over the last 3 years, the need for an adequate increase in yearly media revenue is vital for the long term health of the Big East. Which is why, among a few other nerdy quirks, I’ve been manually tracking the conference TV ratings for the past 3 seasons, building interactive dashboards for all to use.
2024 Dashboard
2023 Dashboard
2022 Dashboard
Ratings are not just a vain popularity contest at this point. Even though the Big East teams don’t have football expenses, the financial necessity of a top-tier basketball TV contract has never been more important. For the Big10 and SEC teams of the world, basketball spending is a blip to their budget. Sure, there are other sources of funding individually, but being able to provide a bit of security from the conference helps set high baselines.
And to be honest, the Big East’s ratings have never been great, either for college basketball as a whole or for FS1 individually. Which isn’t unexpected from 10 (at the time) relatively small private schools. (I said as much in 2013 before the old Big East had officially died.)
So there are real questions and concerns as to whether FOX would have interest at a price point that would make sense for the Big East. And why the ratings news we have seen is so positive.
Top 10 ratings
In the 2024 dashboard above, you can filter the full ratings to just specific channels and types of games. For this purpose, I wanted to just see Big East conference games on FS1, as those make up a majority of the content that should be of interest to viewers, and is controllable year over year. Some seasons the non-con slates will be better than others, but the round robin conference matchups will remain.
My source for ratings changed from Showbuzz Daily to Sports Media Watch, which allowed us to see not just those telecasts over 200K (like in 2022) or in the top-100 of a given day’s telecasts (like in 2023) and thus provided a full accounting of every Big East game, which will increase the total and dampen the average. Just a background as to why there are so different
And without the data to analyze the full spectrum, I wanted to stick to what was an apples to apples comparison, the top-10 rated Big East regular season games. Below is a table with the top-10 rated FS1 games in the Big East conference season.
As you can see, there was a remarkable improvement in this area, jumping over 46% for the average of the top 10 games from 2023, and 55% from 2022. And even though the 709K for Creighton vs UConn was a regular season record on FS1 for the Big East, it wasn’t just one outlier tipping the scales and messing with the average.
The top rated game in 2023 (St. John’s vs Creighton) would only be the 8th best telecast in 2024. The jump wasn’t just from 1 game, it was a broad based lifting of the scales.
Going past the top 10, there were 30 individual games that topped 200K in 2024, compared to 20 in 2023 and 16 in 2022. Sure, 200K is an arbitrary cutoff, and not a particularly large number, but this shows a fairly significant movement for the conference as a whole. It matters greatly.
What Changed?
There are plenty of factors that might go into such a change, but for my money, these 3 were the key.
1. UConn Back
You know how I mentioned that the Big East was composed of 10 relatively small private schools? That’s not true any more. Since UConn and its large public school following rejoined in the 2021 season. And more importantly, they not only won the national title in 2023, but they were in the top-3 of the AP rankings for most of the conference season. People love to watch teams they know, and they love highly rated teams. UConn was a behemoth for ratings, even moreso than prime Nova.
For reference, UConn was in 6 of the top-10 rated FS1 games in Big East play, including the top-3, all over 500K. They had 11 games air on FS1 and averaged 355K viewers a game. In FS1 conference games that didn’t feature UConn, the Big East averaged 184K viewers.
Here’s the full team by team breakdown (with 1 game pending between St. John’s and DePaul that will be below 100K).
The Huskies have a large following and have amassed plenty of interest with generic fans. They have driven a significant portion of the lift at the top.
2. Big Ten Coattails
Don’t get me wrong, the Big East has plenty going for it on its own, but a few of those gaudy numbers wouldn’t have happened without a little help from the behemoth that is the Big Ten.
Take Butler vs. Creighton on Friday, Feb. 2nd. These are not natural rivals, and though Creighton was in the top-25, doesn’t necessarily move the needle on its own. The game was very good, and turned into quite the upset, but why was the final rating 484K viewers when no Creighton v Butler FS1 game had ever cracked 200K?
It was preceded by Ohio State at Iowa, which itself averaged 465K. Those peeps stuck around and ended up watching a fantastic contest.
What about another Butler game, this one with UConn that drew 503K on Friday, Jan. 5th? It wasn’t preceded by a Big Ten game, but instead was the lead-in for a top-10 game between Purdue and Illinois that pulled in 904K viewers.
What about Seton Hall vs St. John’s that pulled in 405K on Sunday Feb 18th at 5pm? Wouldn’t you know it, Northwestern and Indiana pulled in 492K in the 3pm slot directly before it. Don’t believe in the correlation? The same matchup between Seton Hall and the Johnnies only garnered 175K on Jan 16, just a month earlier, without a Big Ten game before it.
Again, that isn’t to say the Big Ten is solely responsible for every big rating. Neither of UConn’s games against Marquette or Creighton that each had huge numbers had a Big Ten tie-in. All I’m saying is that when FS1 blended Big Ten and Big East games, the Big East results were significantly higher than normal.
3. FS1 Awareness
FS1’s aim back in 2013 when it launched was to build an alternative that was equal to ESPN. It has not. Not even close.
But with the addition of more Big Ten content, what it has done was built an ESPN-2 equivalent. Which is a big step up. Before, FS1 was the equivalent to ESPN-U, with only occasional ratings that bumped past the 300K threshold.
Now that customers are getting used to seeing their preferred content on FS1, it isn’t quite as niche, which in turn has had a positive effect for the Big East.
What Does This Mean For The New Contract?
No idea. The TV landscape is significantly worse now than it was 2 years ago. If you aren’t the NFL, NBA or one of 3 CFB conferences, the money just hasn’t shown up from linear broadcast partners (RIP Pac-12).
My guess a year and a half ago was that the Big East would reup with the conference for about $7.5M a year per team, about 50% higher than the contract they signed in 2013. I still think that’s within the right zip code, but with less confidence for an overpayment than before.
What is true is that the Big East now has a stable of extremely qualified coaches. A blue blood in UConn. A new blood in Villanova. And over half the schools with significant investments in their product.
The Big East can’t compete with giant land grant universities for eyeballs. But if it continues to deliver high quality content with highly rated teams, this season’s TV ratings have shown that there is still room for growth.
Paint Touches 
The Big East is the toughest conference. Let’s Go Friars
Wonder what UConn in the Big Ten would look like today versus taking Rutgers years ago?