Mick Cronin doesn’t think Duke-Michigan at Madison Square Garden is going to happen on Amazon. At least not with Michigan involved.
“No chance it goes through,” the UCLA Bruins head men’s basketball coach told USA Today. “Not when Fox has paid hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars for the rights.”
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Cronin’s skepticism is well-founded.
When Duke announced its landmark three-game deal with Amazon Prime Video last month — UConn in Las Vegas on Nov. 25, Michigan at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 21, and Gonzaga in Detroit on Feb. 20 — the immediate question was whether the Big Ten would allow Michigan to participate. It hasn’t. According to On3’s Brett McMurphy, Michigan never received approval from the Big Ten for the deal, which means the Wolverines could be replaced as Duke’s opponent in the marquee Garden game.
The Big Ten’s objection is rooted in a rights dispute that we covered in depth here at Awful Announcing. The conference claims it controls the media rights to a Duke-Michigan neutral-site game in New York under an alternating arrangement with the ACC for games played in “shared territory” — markets where both conferences have natural broadcast interest, like New York City — per Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger.
The precedent behind that claim dates to Duke playing Illinois at MSG on Fox in 2025, then playing Michigan on ESPN in Washington, D.C., this past February, as ESPN’s “return” in the alternating pattern. That February game drew 4.3 million viewers, making it ESPN’s most-watched college basketball game in seven years, and was part of ESPN’s record day of college basketball viewership. The Big Ten’s argument is that the next game in that pattern — Duke-Michigan in New York — belongs to Fox.
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An IP lawyer who analyzed the Big Ten’s claim was skeptical, pointing out that Fox’s contractual relationship runs through ESPN and the ACC, not through Duke or Amazon directly. Duke isn’t a party to the inter-conference agreement. Neither is Amazon. Whatever rights exist in that alternating arrangement run between the conferences and their respective broadcast partners, not against the world. But as Cronin’s comment makes clear, Fox isn’t going to sit quietly while a game it believes it has rights to ends up on a competing streaming service, and the Big Ten, whose primary rights partner is Fox, isn’t inclined to let that happen regardless of what the lawyers say.
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips shed light last week on how the deal came together in the first place. As was previously reported, Phillips confirmed that ESPN was involved throughout the process — “ESPN was in every one of the conversations,” he said — and that Duke had to make commitments to its primary rights partner to get the deal done, including agreeing to participate in ESPN-controlled nonconference events in the 2027-28 and 2028-29 seasons. Duke didn’t go around ESPN. It went through them.
According to Ben Portnoy in the Sports Business Journal, Duke’s three-game package has been characterized as essentially a replacement for multi-team events — the early-season neutral-site tournaments like the Maui Invitational that programs use to build nonconference schedules. Teams are permitted one MTE per season, and by structuring this as a package sold through third-party promoters rather than directly to Amazon, Duke appears to have found a path around the standard restrictions. The two games outside shared territory — UConn in Las Vegas and Gonzaga in Detroit — face no real rights dispute. It’s the Garden game that remains the problem.
The Big Ten hasn’t approved it, Fox hasn’t walked away from its claim, and Cronin — for whatever his perspective is worth as an outside observer — doesn’t think it survives any of that. If Michigan does end up getting replaced, Duke still has a package. It just needs a different opponent in New York come December.
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