Why a Single-Seller Approach Makes Sense for College Basketball Media Rights (too), John Kosner's Latest SBJ Column With Ed Desser
Original Article: Sports Business Journal, by Ed Desser and John Kosner, July 13th, 2026
In April, we estimated that college football could generate 2034-35 rights fees in excess of $14.8 billion, up from $3.9 billion currently, should a “single seller” negotiate them, and make other programming changes. That’s how the NFL and NBA operate (also see our NFL programming piece in SBJ, Sept. 1, 2025).
Colleagues asked, “What about college basketball?”
It’s complicated. The most valuable rights, the men’s and women’s basketball championships, are already licensed by a single seller: the NCAA. Even without a formal analysis, we believe that many similar ideas would apply, growing rights fees meaningfully:
College basketball reaches every town with great rivalries and generational, passionate fans — 23,000-plus men’s and women’s regular-season D-I, plus 150 March Madness games — over five months. A single seller would identify the most attractive regular-season games (including the biggest rivalries) and place them on the most widely distributed/viewed broadcast and streaming platforms. Imagine seasonlong sponsorship and data rights, packaging scale with a true tentpole championship event.
Aggregating the content, a single seller could package it differently. All programming not included in the national TV agreements, as with the NBA, could be licensed for pay streaming (a college version of “League Pass” plus “RedZone”), local TV and potentially “multi-plexed” on conference networks.
Unlike football, regular-season basketball is already played on most days of the week, so there is little scheduling improvement opportunity beyond focusing on systematically spreading attractive matchups across nights, and time periods, to flow higher audiences to existing games.
With NIL keeping athletes in school, and universities themselves now creating super teams, a single seller would also follow the 2026 World Cup model, setting up exclusive Creator and Access programs with YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.
Currently, the conferences package football/basketball with “Olympic sports” to obtain exposure for the “nonrevenue” events. Admirably, this strategy has grown the exposure for those sports. However, it obscures the true value of football and basketball, just as combining with football deflects value to basketball. The right answer here may vary between conferences and regions, but packaging should be optimized to permit the maximum revenue and exposure possible for various college sports, with the recognition that requiring too many low-viewership events on national TV drives up network production and opportunity costs, which could otherwise accrue to the bottom line of “revenue” sports.
The big opportunities for increased revenue come leading into 2032. That’s when the NCAA will next bid both basketball tournaments. Several thoughts here:
We have been advocates for combining the men’s and women’s championships to create a Super Bowl of Basketball weekend. One city, one dome; all fans, all college personnel, sponsors and media. Major events value is booming. As great as March Madness is, it can be significantly enhanced. Like a Grand Slam tennis championship, the men’s and women’s events together are worth more than each negotiated separately. If the NCAA stages this format once, 2029 in Indianapolis or 2030 in San Antonio, it’ll never go back.
Separate control of the NCAA sponsorship rights from the current CBS/Turner men’s basketball package. In our 2021 NCAA Media report, we explained the pie for everyone gets bigger if these sales are not limited just to huge must-have men’s basketball sponsors. Marketers that want to focus on, say, volleyball or baseball/softball, or even women’s basketball, are incremental. Requiring them, at top dollar, to buy through the men’s basketball package to support the NCAA only grows CBS/Turner’s leverage for the men’s event.
The men’s tournament could be enhanced by:
Playing the first full round of 64 (true national sports holidays) on Saturday and Sunday (moving the expanded play-in to Thursday and Friday), allowing for more first-round viewing and providing second-round scheduling optionality, since there are then just eight games per day, making sequential starts featuring the second half of every game;
Programming the most attractive (men’s and women’s) Sunday matchups in prime time, not just afternoons; and
Holding the first two rounds on-campus at the highest seeds, as the women already do, making the regular season matter more.
Subject for another column: Should the NCAA consider a College World Series-style, best-of-three format for the Final Four? For media rights, adding inventory later in the tournament is far more valuable than earlier, and benefits the best teams.
The NCAA’s decision to package the 39 other championships together with women’s basketball should be reconsidered. Our core idea is to have maximum bidding for basketball, and find good homes for the rest of the championships that don’t really require connection with basketball to get attention and airtime today. As currently constituted, the combined NCAA Championships package has only one practical address and bidder: ESPN. It’s the only company that can properly accommodate everything.
We suggest the same aggregated regular-season/postseason content analysis for the other 39 championships. They can be repackaged and auctioned off separately to interested parties. Fox, NBC, Turner, ESPN, Apple and Netflix are all focused on baseball; structure a college baseball/softball package to get them interested. It’s quite possible ESPN re-acquires the bundle — it’s great content! — but we suspect this way, the colleges would get fairer value.
The current approach to programming and selling college sports leaves way too much value, money and viewership on the table, while schools have a more pressing demand to increase revenue to help pay the significant expansion in their product costs. Upcoming negotiations provide the opportunity to rethink programming and packaging, which could help all major college programs — and reward fans, too.
Ed Desser was the NBA’s senior media executive for 23 years. Today he is president of consultancy Desser Sports Media Inc. (www.desser.tv). John Kosner was ESPN’s senior digital media executive and is now an investor in digital startups and president of consultancy Kosner Media (www.kosnermedia.com). Together they ran the NBA’s media operations in the 80s and 90s under David Stern.
