Tag: Media Rights

Report: Oklahoma, Texas release joint statement on future with the Big 12

After reports surfaced Wednesday afternoon, the Sooners and Longhorns made their grant of rights plans official in joint statement.

What has been expected since Wednesday has come to pass. The Oklahoma Sooners and the Texas Longhorns are on their way out of the Big 12.

After several days of reports, the University of Oklahoma officially announced in a joint statement with the University of Texas that the Oklahoma Sooners and the Texas Longhorns will break with the Big 12 when their grant of media rights expires in 2025.

Though the Sooners “intend to honor their existing grant of rights agreement,” they believe that providing notice at this juncture was important “in advance of the expiration of the conference’s current media rights agreement.”

While both universities intend to honor the existing agreements, they did leave space for that to change as they “continue to monitor the rapidly evolving collegiate landscape.”

College football as we know it has been upended over the last couple of months. Just as the name, image and likeness era has begun, two of the Big 12’s premier college football teams will be migrating to a new conference, presumably the Southeastern Conference.

Though nothing’s official at this stage, it’s expected the Sooners and the Longhorns will land in the SEC when it comes time to announce their new conference affiliation.

Despite meeting with the Big 12, Oklahoma expected to inform conference of exit

Oklahoma Sooners are expected to inform Big 12 of their exit on Monday.

On Sunday evening the Oklahoma Sooners school president Jay Harroz met with the Big 12 Conference’s executive committee. According to the statement released by the conference, they believe the conversation was productive and hopefully will lead to more in the coming days.

ESPN’s Heather Dinich believes this is a wasted effort by the Big 12 in hopes of keeping the two anchor schools.

Big 12 sources told ESPN’s Heather Dinich they are still expecting Oklahoma and Texas to formally notify the league on Monday that they don’t intend to extend their existing media rights deals with the conference, which expire in June 2025. – Dave Wilson, ESPN

While that move is still years away, it is likely that Oklahoma and/or Texas don’t wait until the end of their current deal to leave the conference. Would the SEC extend an invitation to both blue blood programs knowing they will stay through the 2024-25 college football season?

As Dave Wilson writes, it could be a legal strategy for both schools until an exit plan has been agreed upon.

It’s a possible legal strategy, one source surmised, that would supersede the reality of the fractured relationships it’s bound to cause within the league.

One Big 12 source told ESPN their conference officials are anticipating that the SEC presidents and chancellors will eventually vote on whether to formally extend an invitation to Oklahoma and Texas. There is no current timetable as to when a vote might happen, according to an SEC source. The question is if the SEC would extend an invitation knowing the legal strategy of Texas and Oklahoma is to stay through the duration of the TV contract — if that’s what those schools choose to do.

While the Big 12 continues its effort to keep both schools in-house, that relationship could be too far gone to turn it around. That remains to be seen but this story is still being written.

Stay tuned.

WATCH: How many billions will the NBA make in its new broadcast deal?

How we watch the Celtics and the NBA may be changing in the not-too-distant future.

The last time the NBA made a deal for its media broadcast rights, it brought in so much money it changed the face of the league for much of a decade in the form of the Golden State Warriors dynasty being financially possible.

Now, the league is inching towards its next such deal — and it is expected to be substantially bigger given the growth of the league even in these lean times of the pandemic. Estimates of a deal at 75 billion dollars aren’t out of the realm of the realistic, up considerably from the current one, which is valued at “just” $24 billion and run through the 2024-25 season.

But don’t expect the usual players to be the only ones on the scene.

[mm-video type=video id=01f27mejvmf19gfnem playlist_id=none player_id=01f1jxkahtwnvzepyp image=https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/video/thumbnail/mmplus/01f27mejvmf19gfnem/01f27mejvmf19gfnem-80b2d722238efbace70c29f37facddb0.jpg]

We could be just a few short years away from a revolution in how we watch the league — and through it the Boston Celtics — so check out the video embedded above to get a heads-up on what might be coming down the pike.

This post originally appeared on Celtics Wire. Follow us on Facebook!

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