NCAA Basketball: CBS Sports continues Big East Basketball partnership
By Neil Adler
A tidbit of NCAA basketball news to divulge, as CBS Sports strikes an agreement to keep broadcasting Big East Basketball encounters for another six seasons.
CBS Sports has partnered with Big East Basketball for more than three decades in televising NCAA basketball tilts, and that broadcasting marriage will carry on for at least a half-dozen additional years. On Thursday, CBS Sports announced that it had reached a new agreement with the Big East to air some of that conference’s clashes through the 2024-25 stanza.
According to the CBS Sports press release, the agreement provides national exposure for 20 men’s regular-season games, with a minimum of two appearances for each of the 10 Big East schools.
CBS Sports will televise up to four affairs per campaign, with the remaining contests running on the CBS Sports Network. This transaction, for which financial terms didn’t get disclosed, is the result of a sublicense agreement with FOX Sports, per the CBS Sports announcement.
“The depth of the conference has never been stronger and we are excited to continue our long-standing relationship with the Big East in delivering high-quality basketball to our viewers,” said Dan Weinberg, CBS Sports’ Executive Vice President of Programming, in the press statement.
Weinberg is correct in that the Big East does possess a tremendous amount of depth, and parity I might add, although the conference didn’t fare all that well in the most-recent NCAA Tournament, securing just one total triumph. On the plus side, Villanova captured national titles in 2016 and 2018, and the Big East regular-season race – involving teams like the aforementioned Wildcats, Marquette, Seton Hall and Georgetown, among others – should prove extremely competitive and entertaining in 2019-20.
“We’re very excited that the long-standing national television coverage Big East basketball has enjoyed on CBS Sports will be continuing for the next six years,” the conference’s commissioner, Val Ackerman, noted in the CBS Sports announcement. “We’re grateful for the outstanding support CBS provides annually to the college game and look forward to partnering to bring compelling broadcasts to our fans around the country.”
Next. Early Big East power rankings for 2019-20. dark
CBS Sports, along with TBS, TNT and truTV, provide full national coverage of the entire NCAA Tournament, while CBS Sports also airs a regular-season schedule of more than 40 encounters, including conference championships from the Big Ten, Atlantic 10, Mountain West and Missouri Valley.