Seven Big Ten Football Games Officially Named Peacock Exclusive, Will Not Be Televised

Well, Big Ten football fans, we’ve known this was coming. The announcement was made long ago, and we’re a few weeks past NBC officially announcing the two non-conference games that would be exclusively on paid streaming service Peacock.

While Michigan‘s tune-up against East Carolina being Peacock-exclusive is a tax that Michigan fans will likely bear alone, Michigan State‘s road test at Washington is a bit more consequential. Nevertheless, the rest of that announcement showed Peacock as a companion to network broadcasting for the most part.

Today, the internet got the details on what conference games would be positioned behind the paywall NBC has erected in contempt of Big Ten fans.

X Premium user Brett McMurphy X’d out the lineup this morning. If X allows me, I’ll embed McMurphy’s X below.

Well, okay, I guess our platform won’t display the entire X. If you follow us on X, we’ll re-X it from our X account.

Did you find all that confusing? I could just call it a tweet, but that would defy the notion that the Big Brain Geniuses that own all of our news and entertainment know what’s best for us even better than do we ourselves. To call it a tweet instead of an X may even suggest that the network owners and executives currently reshaping college football to conform with their vision of a valuable entertainment product are in fact fallible, and that they might have been better off just investing in the quirky and distinctive raw sports entertainment material that they bought so long ago instead of sacrificing its unique voice to bend it to their whim!

But enough about the landlords of this blog.

The seven new Peacock exclusive games are:

9/30: Michigan State at Iowa (2:30)
10/7: Rutgers at Wisconsin (11:00)
10/7: Maryland at Ohio State (2:30)
10/14: Illinois at Maryland (11:00)
11/4: Iowa at Northwestern (2:30)
11/11: Minnesota at Purdue (11:00)

For this year, Penn State, Nebraska and Indiana skated on the indignity of being relegated from television, while Michigan will at least have all of their B1G games televised.

Despite what Wall Street says, we’re heading into football season with many Americans still facing economic headwinds. Inflation is down, but the inflation that already happened is still baked in. Did you get a cost-of-living adjustment to your pay? Probably not. Student loan payments are going to start up again right in the middle of that Peacock slate.

Unlike channels that stream creative works like TV shows, however, NBC won’t be willing to simply sit on the rights and not broadcast the games.

So when you want to figure out how to watch your team, but they’re not on TV, ask yourself a question.

What would Mike Leach do?