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SEC Reaches $3 Billion Deal With Disney, Drawing CBS Ties Toward an End

The Southeastern Conference is poised to become the richest conference in college football after it struck a television deal with Disney, which owns ABC and ESPN.

Alabama facing Auburn in the Iron Bowl is one of the marquee games of the Southeastern Conference each year. Disney bought the rights to the league’s game for 10 years starting in 2024.Credit...Mickey Welsh/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

The broadcast rights to the Southeastern Conference’s biggest football games, like the annual Iron Bowl matchup between Alabama and Auburn, have been purchased by Disney, meaning that all of the league’s games will appear on its networks including ABC and ESPN for 10 years starting in 2024.

The agreement, announced Thursday evening by the ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro at Disney’s investor day, will end the SEC’s nearly three-decade association with CBS, and give Disney ownership of all of the SEC’s lucrative, and accordingly expensive, media rights.

ESPN will pay the SEC around $300 million annually for the rights, according to two people with knowledge of the agreement who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to speak publicly. That is nearly a sixfold increase from the $55 million annually CBS currently pays.

ABC will show Saturday afternoon SEC games, “as well as selected Saturday primetime football games” according to an SEC news release. That is in addition to other SEC football games that will appear across ESPN cable channels and the ESPN+ streaming service.

“We will be able to schedule games on any network in any of the windows, which will allow for flexibility in that regard vis-à-vis teams that would prefer to be at night and afternoon,” said Burke Magnus, an ESPN executive, at a news conference.

Greg Sankey, the SEC’s commissioner, indicated that Disney’s scheduling flexibility across times and networks was a key consideration in the conference’s sale of the rights to it.

“One of our primary goals was to improve the television scheduling process in ways that will benefit our students, coaches, alumni and fans,” Sankey said in the news release. “With all SEC events now under The Walt Disney Company umbrella, we were able to craft an agreement that includes more lead time for many game time announcements, and in many ways modernizes the college football scheduling process.”

The new deal, worth at least $3 billion in total, adds on to Disney’s existing foothold in the SEC.

CBS has been the signature television home of SEC football since 1996, and of the conference’s championship game since 2001. Even after ESPN signed a $2 billion agreement with the SEC in 2008, and then created the SEC Network in 2013 and extended its agreement with the conference through 2034, CBS retained the rights to one SEC football game each week.

Importantly, CBS also got the first choice of games each week. The network’s 3:30 p.m. Eastern slot was effectively appointment television on autumn Saturdays, and CBS also had some SEC doubleheaders and the league championship game.

The SEC and CBS signed a 15-year rights agreement in 2008, just before an explosion of television money reached college sports. Even after the SEC expanded and created the SEC Network with ESPN, the financial terms of its agreement with CBS remained unchanged — and ultimately became a fantastic bargain for CBS.

With the new agreement, the SEC could overtake the Big Ten Conference as the richest league in college sports.

The SEC, home to 10 of the last 14 national champions in football, swaggers more than any other league in college football, with a slogan — “it just means more” — that elicits as many knowing nods as sneers and jokes. The conference, which is based in Birmingham, Ala., and includes powerhouses like Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Louisiana State, distributed more than $624 million to its 14 schools for the 2018-19 fiscal year, the most recent year for which data is available.

Only a decade earlier, the SEC, then with a dozen members, paid out $132.5 million to its universities.

And while the league can credit ESPN for much of its recent financial rise, CBS has remained an integral part of college football culture in the South. Many fans referred to the longtime announcers Verne Lundquist, who retired from SEC football in 2016, and Gary Danielson by their first names.

This fall, even the pandemic-delayed Masters golf tournament effectively planned the timing of its third round to accommodate sunset — and CBS’s plans for the Alabama at L.S.U. game, an ordinarily titanic matchup that has long drawn viewers. (The game was eventually postponed because of coronavirus issues at L.S.U., and the rescheduled matchup drew disappointing ratings, partly because of how L.S.U. has declined since it won last season’s national title.)

It became apparent a year ago that the SEC’s relationship with CBS would conclude at the end of the contract, if not sooner, as conferences struck ever-richer deals. Sports Business Journal reported last December that CBS had pulled out of bidding on an extension of the agreement.

“We made a strong and responsible bid,” a CBS spokeswoman told the publication. “While we‘ve had success with the SEC on CBS, we are instead choosing to aggressively focus on other important strategic priorities moving forward.”

CBS will still show SEC football for the next three years. While there has been some speculation that Disney will buy out the remaining years of the CBS agreement, ESPN’s Magnus said, “We are open to that possibility, but obviously it would have to be a circumstance that works for all involved.” But he also said that decision wasn’t in ESPN’s control, and that the company was “perfectly comfortable” waiting for three more years.

Kevin Draper is a sports business reporter, covering the leagues, owners, unions, stadiums and media companies behind the games. Prior to joining The Times, he was an editor at Deadspin. More about Kevin Draper

Alan Blinder travels the country covering college sports and is based in Atlanta. In his previous role as a national correspondent, he reported from more than two dozen states. He joined The Times in 2013. More about Alan Blinder

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: SEC and Disney Reach TV Deal Worth $3 Billion. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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