Fox College Hoops

History

Fox first got into the college basketball business in 2013 with a 12-year deal for Big East games, covering the conference that formed after its non-football schools kept the Big East name and the football-playing members became the American Athletic Conference. CBS Sports later picked up some extra Big East games through a sub-license, mostly putting them on CBS Sports Network. Starting in 2014, Fox’s contract with the Pac-12 gave it 22 regular-season basketball games each year, plus a share of the men’s conference tournament alongside ESPN and the Pac-12 Network. That same year, Fox’s main broadcast network began carrying the Las Vegas Invitational and Las Vegas Classic early-season events, and Fox Sports bought both tournaments outright in 2015. In 2017, Fox added Big Ten games to its lineup as part of a six-year deal that also included the conference’s top football package, with ESPN and CBS sharing the basketball rights too. Fox Sports has run the Big Ten Network since its 2007 launch, and that channel continues to air Big Ten games. From the 2020–21 season, Fox split Mountain West basketball and football rights with CBS. To kick off the 2021–22 season, Fox aired six Big East games simultaneously on November 9, 2021, with all games streaming online and a whiparound show on FS1. A November 23 game that year featured a podcast-style broadcast with Mark Titus and Tate Frazier, hosts of the Fox Sports-distributed Titus & Tate podcast. In August 2022, Fox renewed its Big Ten rights with a seven-year deal starting in 2023–24, keeping 45 men’s games per season on Fox and FS1 plus some women’s games. That October, Fox also renewed its Big 12 rights and added a package of basketball games for Fox and FS1. For the 2022–23 season, Fox launched a Saturday primetime lineup called Fox Primetime Hoops and put six women’s games on the main network, including the first Big Ten women’s games ever aired on Fox. In April 2024, Fox Sports partnered with AEG to create a new postseason tournament, the College Basketball Crown, set to debut in Las Vegas in 2025. This 16-team event will mostly include teams from the Big East, Big Ten, and Big 12 that missed the NCAA tournament.