Sports

TV deal holds key to Big East future

NEWPORT, R.I. — By the time Big East commissioner John Marinatto took the podium yesterday to offer his most confident assessment of his league’s future, most of the nation’s most powerful sports television executives had left to begin contemplating what kind of an offer it would take to lure the conference away from ESPN and CBS.

And everyone was speculating over the Big East’s membership when the television negotiations begin in September of 2012.

As reported exclusively in yesterday’s Post, several TV executives and media consultants said the Big East would be best served if it parted with some non-football schools such as DePaul, Marquette, Providence and Seton Hall and added some BCS football members.

Marinatto stopped short of saying that never would happen.

“My job is to find ways to make things work,” he told The Post. “That’s not an easy thing to do when you’re representing schools with various commitments.”

Should the league secure a deal similar to the Pac-12’s $4 billion deal over 12 years, it could allot higher slices of the pie for schools that play BCS football and smaller slices for others.

That could force some schools to consider other league affiliation, thus avoiding a messy divorce. But the goal is to keep the league together, even if means expanding from 16 teams (TCU joins next fall) to 18 so that football has at least 10 members for a league football title game.

As for conference affiliation, Marinatto said expansion and a TV deal go hand-in-hand. Sources told The Post that Marinatto has had face-to-face meetings with every school that reportedly has interest in joining the Big East, or that the league might consider adding.

One highly placed league source said the Big East has long eyed Army and Navy. The Army-Navy game has the largest TV footprint in college football.

Central Florida remains the most likely conventional option, but the league also might not make a move if it’s confident the right TV deal is to be had.

Being floated is the idea of alternating the television rights to the men’s basketball tournament, considered the crown jewel in the league’s inventory.

For example, the Big East could strike deals with Comcast/NBC, which sources said will be a major player in the upcoming negotiations, and Fox, in which the networks alternate years televising the men’s and women’s tournaments.

Comcast/NBC, which yesterday officially announced it is converting its Versus network to NBC Sports in January, could offer the Big East a prime Saturday football time slot following its weekly Notre Dame football game.

CBS, which recently lost the rights to the ACC, is looking for more college sports programming and might like to fill the void created by the loss of North Carolina-Duke with Syracuse-Georgetown.

“The Big East has benefited from gaining a lot of knowledge based on what happened in the Pac-12 and the ACC,” sports media consultant Lee Berke told The Post. “And based on its media markets, it should be considered on the same level with leagues such as the Big Ten and ACC.”

Perhaps it should. ESPN and CBS have exclusive negotiating windows that open in September of 2012. A source said the league would not take significantly less money to stay with ESPN, its longstanding TV partner.

“It’s the most important television negotiation in our history,” said Marinatto. “We have a 13-month runway to prepare for it.”