If you haven’t been paying much attention to the shifting media landscape over the offseason, today’s announcement of TV networks and tip times for Marquette’s games may have been a bit of a surprise. For the first time since the Big East reformation, one of Marquette’s games won’t be on linear television, and will require a streaming platform to view it.
The conference signed a new media deal earlier this year that is set to begin next season. But one portion will start this one, as Peacock will be a primary distributor of both regular season and Big East Tournament games.
For Marquette, that means 3 conference games (Seton Hall, DePaul and Georgetown) and 1 non-conference game (George Mason) will be exclusively shown on Peacock.
And that got me wondering, how does this distribution compare to prior years?
Takeaways
- Charting the past 3 seasons, you can see that it looks like most of the Peacock inventory came from FS1 games, as this is the only channel that saw a big decrease
- 2 games are listed as FOX/FS1, so still uncertain, but at most, Marquette will play 14 games on FS1, the fewest in a full season since the reformation
- While ESPN and ESPN2 are listed at 0, that probably will change in the next few weeks. ESPN owns the rights to the Big 12’s Tier A games, so that might fall in there somewhere. Maryland looks to be on Big Ten Network or Peacock, as it wasn’t announced at this release
- Marquette’s neutral site game vs Georgia in the Bahamas does not have a TV designation listed, as the organizers sell those rights. I think that’s another likely ESPN2/ESPN+ addition, though theoretically could fall to something like Flo Sports.
And the big takeaway from all of this, the TV networks have plenty of faith in Shaka’s team this upcoming season. Back before the 2023 season, I broke down why seeing MU get 5 CBS Sports games was bulletin board material.
Network CBS and FOX games involving Big East teams averaged over 800K, and are very valuable real estate, so seeing Marquette have the 2nd most FOX games in the league, with Creighton, tells us a lot about how the networks value this year’s squad.
And here is a recap of the 2024 season viewrship for Marquette from our TV ratings dashboard.
For a full list of games and tip times, be sure to check out Marquette’s official site.
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