During Big Ten Media Day on Wednesday, CBS EVP of Programming Dan Weinberg talked about the network’s new media rights deal with the conference and revealed some interesting information.
Notably, Weinberg said that CBS, Fox, and NBC would each get the top game pick in a week several times throughout the season, per the Indy Star.
“We’re all going to have first pick multiple times over the course of the season,” Weinberg said. “But the depth of the league in particular, especially when the new members come in and when the (College Football Playoff) expands, the combination of those things create such depth that whether you have the top pick or not in any given week, you know you’re still going to have a very high quality game.”
Network game assignments each week when multiple networks are involved have always interested us. It seems like a simple process, but there is probably a lot more that goes into it than we realize, and we’d love a peek behind the curtain to see how it works.
Weinberg’s revelation that the three networks will rotate the top pick each week makes all the sense in the world because if a network is paying hundreds of millions of dollars to air Big Ten games, it doesn’t want to get stuck with the dregs each week.
The networks rotating the top pick should also help break up some of the monotony in start times and network assignments for teams. It seemed like almost every significant Big Ten game was on Fox in the Big Noon window in recent seasons. Maybe, with three networks in the fray claiming three different windows, they’ll all have a little more variety.
