Greg Sankey: SEC media rights deal with ESPN is undervalued

The NFL isn’t alone in believing its media rights deals are undervalued in the current marketplace. Now it’s the SEC saying its deal is below market rate.

At a press conference during SEC spring meetings this week, conference commissioner Greg Sankey was asked whether he believed the SEC’s media deal with ESPN — a 10-year pact that began in 2024 and is worth an average of $710 million per year — was undervalued. Sankey didn’t beat around the bush.

“Yes,” the commissioner answered. “But, I’d rather be over-delivering than under-delivering,” Sankey said, per college football writer Trey Wallace.

Does Greg Sankey feel as though their media rights are undervalued by ESPN, with recent ratings success.

“Yes”

“But, I’d rather be over delivering than underdelivering”

— Trey Wallace (@TreyWallace) May 27, 2026

Through a pretty simple analysis of the numbers, one can see where Sankey is coming from. On a per-year basis, the SEC is generating about $400 million less in media rights revenue than its counterparts at the Big Ten. Fox, CBS, and NBC reportedly pay a combined $1.15 billion annually for Big Ten rights.

However, the SEC has been the dominant conference in terms of television ratings in each of the two seasons since the league moved fully under ESPN/ABC’s purview. Across the 42 Saturday college football television windows last season (noon, mid-afternoon, and primetime), ABC had the most-watched game in 34 of them. All but four of those ABC games featured an SEC team; most featured two.

By comparison, Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff window, which is typically the showcase window for the Big Ten, won the noon timeslot in just seven of 14 weeks. In other words, a premier Big Ten game regularly averaged fewer viewers than the third-best SEC game of the week in the same window on ABC.

So when Sankey asserts that the SEC’s media rights deal is undervalued, that is what he means. The conference is delivering the best viewership in the sport, and it’s not close, but is getting paid substantially less than its main competitor.

It’s quite a similar situation to what the NFL finds itself in. Following the NBA’s most recent set of media rights deals, which pays the league $76 billion over 11 years, the NFL realized its deals — a mere $110 billion over 10 years — were a bargain for broadcasters. After all, exponentially more people watch the NFL than the NBA, yet broadcasters like NBC and Prime Video were actually paying more for their NBA package than their NFL package. This, of course, has led the NFL to attempt an early renegotiation of its media rights deals.

The SEC doesn’t seem destined to follow in the NFL’s footsteps here. As Sankey said himself, the conference is fine over-delivering. He knows that continued viewership strength should give the conference plenty of leverage when the next media rights negotiations come around.

That’s a ways down the road for the SEC, whose deal with ESPN runs through 2034. But so long as the conference’s schools are still able to compete with its Big Ten counterparts for talent acquisition, Sankey believes the revenue gap can be solved later.