NEW YORK (AP) — The college football playoff system will be televised on ESPN for 12 years once it starts after the 2014 season,
the network said Wednesday.
The title game will be played on a Monday, at least a week after the semifinals.
The deal is worth close to $500 million a year, a person with knowledge of the terms said. The person spoke on condition of
anonymity because the fee had not been announced.
"Folks are going to love this playoff and the attention ESPN will give to it," BCS executive director Bill Hancock said in
a statement.
ESPN's current four-year contract to air the Sugar, Orange and Fiesta bowls along with the BCS title game is worth about $125
million per year.
ESPN will own the rights to all six bowls
involved in the four-team playoff system. Conference commissioners had
decided that
the two semifinals would rotate among those half-dozen sites; the
four not involved each year will host major bowl games similar
to the current BCS contests. The title game will be bid out each
season through a separate process, as the Super Bowl is for
the NFL.
There will be three "contract bowls" that
offer automatic bids to particular conferences in years they don't host
one of the
semifinals: the Rose, Sugar and Orange. The network already had
separate deals for the same 12-year period through the 2025
season for those games, which are affiliated with the Pac-12, Big
12, Big Ten, ACC and SEC.
The new agreement also gives ESPN the rights
to the three "host bowls," which will feature at-large teams along with
the top
squad from the group of five conferences without ties to a
contract bowl. The sites for the host bowls are still to be determined,
though the most likely landing spots are the Fiesta Bowl in
Glendale, Ariz., the Cotton Bowl in Arlington, Texas, and the
Chick-fil-A Bowl in Atlanta.
Wednesday's agreement in principle includes rights for TV, radio, mobile, online and international.
"Because of college football's widespread popularity and the incredible passion of its fans, few events are more meaningful
than these games," ESPN President John Skipper said.