The problem with your first statement is Notre Dame isn't going even open up for bids for football. They love that NBC exclusivity and NBC is more than willing to pay them what they need to stay where they are.What’s going to be fun is when ESPN decides to outbid NBC for the Notre Dame home games that are up soon. Throws a bit of a wrench in NBC’s Big Ten idea to push things toward those Notre Dame home games.
The other part of this is Big Ten deal is this draft for the games by Fox, CBS and NBC. If Fox indeed always gets the top game at noon not sure how the order goes for CBS and NBC or if they just rotate every other during this draft. Regardless look at a lot of those weeks in the Big Ten, that third best game, which NBC or CBS would get is a lot of Minnesota v. Michigan State, Iowa v. Purdue, etc. I just went through the weeks, so yes to keep media partners happy (consideration going how much they are paying) they are going to need to schedule smart and find more big games.
Also Ohio State is going to be seeing a lot of noon ET kicks, so hope the Buckeye fans like that. Unless they are going to be able to flex games like NBC Sunday Night Football has. Will be interesting.
Either way the Big 12 needs to have a couple of teams replace OU as the consistent CFP threat to build up the brands of those schools and create bigger games. Will take awhile but view it kind of like Gonzaga bball. They are one of the elite college hoops brands after two decades of winning like they have. We need a couple of schools like that for football moving forward to build to that. Unfortunately Baylor could be one of them barf.
I know it's been mentioned, but there are tons of Big Ten games that are going to pop big ratings that CBS and NBC are going to be more than taken care of and they're going to get their fair share of Ohio State, Michigan, SC, Penn State anyway. Plus Wisconsin, Michigan State, Iowa, Nebraska, UCLA are all reliable ratings draws as is Northwestern when they're good. If Illinois could ever figure it out, they would be too.