Before Notre Dame football kicked off its final home game of the 2023 season, Notre Dame and NBC Sports announced an extension of its media rights agreement through the 2029 season.
The previous contract, which gave NBC Sports the television and streaming rights for all Notre Dame football home games, was set to expire following the 2024 season. The two have been partnered since 1991.
“We are thrilled to continue our historic collaboration with our partners at NBC Sports,” said Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick. “In the next generation of this partnership, we will collaborate to provide our fans even more Notre Dame content through a variety of NBCUniversal’s distribution channels while continuing to put our student-athletes and their stories at the heart of our messaging.”
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Swarbrick, who will retire from his position next year, is set to be replaced by Pete Bevacqua, the former chairman of NBC Sports. Bevacqua has been working alongside Swarbrick since July as special assistant to the president for athletics.
The new contract includes plans for an annual Notre Dame football documentary series to be available on Peacock starting in 2024.
Notre Dame games on NBC Sports are averaged 5.1 million viewers prior to Saturday's game against Wake Forest. NBC Sports says that was the largest audience through five game broadvacts since 2005 and was up 86% from this point last season.
“There is no better tradition than Notre Dame Football in South Bend, and we are thrilled to keep that tradition within the NBC Sports family as we extend our relationship as the exclusive home of Fighting Irish home games through the end of the decade,” said NBC Sports president Rick Cordella. “With enhanced rights that allow us to present Notre Dame Football on NBC as well as across Peacock and additional platforms, we look forward to bringing the Fighting Irish to fans in more ways than ever before.”
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The financial details of the agreement were not shared in Saturday's press release. The money Notre Dame is able to generate from its media rights deal is likely to play a significant role in the football program's ability to remain a conference indepedent.
From the release: "Revenues from the NBC partnership have played a key role in Notre Dame’s financial aid endowment since the start of the relationship in 1991 when University officers allocated a portion of the football television contract revenue for undergraduate scholarship endowment (not athletic scholarships). To date, Notre Dame undergraduate students have received over $100 million in aid from revenue generated through the NBC contract.
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