ESPN Reports On ESPN Negotiation; ESPN Spokesman Declines Comment

Here is an ESPN.com story written by ESPN college football reporter Brett McMurphy about the battle between ESPN and NBC Sports for Big East broadcast rights:

ESPN has until Thursday to match NBC Sports Network's seven-year, $20-$23 million per year offer to retain the Big East's media rights, league sources told ESPN.

[...]

ESPN has had the Big East's basketball media rights since the conference was formed in 1979.

ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz declined comment Friday night.

ESPN's house contains many mansions. We've joked about this sort of thing before, but there really is nothing in the media world quite like ESPN. (Imagine if The New York Times and CNN merged and bought exclusive broadcast rights to the 2016 Republican National Convention.)

NBC Sports's website doesn't have a version of this story up on its site, but it does have an AP story that includes the line:

ESPN.com first reported [NBC Sports'] offer to the Big East.

As is our tradition, we emailed an ESPN spokesman for comment on Krulewitz's no comment. He'll "look into it," he tells us.

UPDATE, 11:24 a.m.: An ESPN spokesman referred us to another ESPN spokesman's previous comment: "The fact is our newsgathering team operates separately from our programming team so my 'no comment' as a corporate spokesperson would have been the same for any outlet that asked."

[ ESPN]