Three Potential Outcomes for Duke Men's Basketball's Bold Amazon Experiment

The Blue Devils could travel three diverging roads in the years to come.

Jon Scheyer and Duke are trying something completely new on television this season. | Geoff Burke-Imagn Images

More than any other sport in North America, cable television built college basketball.

In its early years, when inventory was scant, ESPN turned to the sport to help lure eyeballs—and subscriptions—in college towns across the country. Turner, too, devoured a piece of the pie, both in the 1980s and once it acquired part of the NCAA men’s tournament in the 2010s.

Cable’s primacy in sports, however, has been waning for more than a decade—and on Thursday, Duke men’s basketball put yet another dent in the industry’s armor. The Blue Devils will play three Amazon-exclusive neutral-site games against Gonzaga, Michigan and UConn next season, the university announced.

This significant development—a multiyear deal—has the potential to shake the foundation of the sport. Here’s a look at three ways Duke’s roll of the dice could end.

Scenario No. 1: Duke expands the modestly successful deal to a permanent package in the vein of Notre Dame Football on NBC, but it doesn’t become industry standard

This feels like the most likely scenario. Getting Blue Devils fans to follow their team to Amazon for a few games does not sound like a Herculean task, given the relative affluence of Duke’s alumni base and the sheer size of its wider fan base. At least two of the three games look like guaranteed ratings hits—the rematch with the Huskies in Las Vegas (as long as it’s not up against an NFL game), and the Dec. 21 date with the Wolverines.

If the Blue Devils feel like they’re getting bang for their buck—and with an NIL partnership with Amazon coming, that seems guaranteed—it stands to reason that Duke would want to keep the partnership going. Five years from now, perhaps Duke Basketball on Amazon Prime will become a mini-brand not unlike Notre Dame Football on NBC, with three neutral-site games plus, say, a season-opener or a select power-conference home game.

Scenario No. 2: Duke’s deal is a huge success, the Blue Devils fight for Longhorn Network-style TV autonomy, and ACC basketball is destabilized

But what if Duke’s plan works too well? What if Amazon lines up good announcers and an NBA-style presentation, all three games do big numbers, and the possibility of further direct-to-consumer opportunities seduce the Blue Devils? Notre Dame Football on NBC was an earthquake upon its 1991 inception. A Duke disruption could ripple outward: other ratings juggernauts like Kansas or North Carolina demanding TV most-favored-nation status; the Blue Devils looking to put ACC games on national streaming.

If the money is enticing enough, either of those scenarios could crack college basketball’s already thin ice. We already know, per ESPN’s report on the deal, that Duke had to work with that network to satisfy its commitments to the ACC. It’s worth asking whether the Blue Devils have created a basketball answer to Texas’s Longhorn Network—a vehicle that removed Texas football from the Big 12’s conventional TV framework and paved the way for its defection to the richer SEC.

Scenario No. 3: College sports’s long-shot bid for an antitrust exemption succeeds, and Duke’s deal is absorbed wholesale into a new national TV framework

In recent years, college athletics administrators have initiated a number of lobbying campaigns that can be broadly summarized as “attempting to get an antitrust exemption.” For a number of reasons—competing proposals, other governmental priorities, the general unpopularity of antitrust exemptions—no such exemption has gotten off the ground. If college athletics can’t win an exemption with Republican control of all three branches of government, it doesn’t seem like one is coming in the near future.

Political winds can change quickly quickly, though—so it’s worth asking what happens if a slam-dunk argument motivates Congress to give college athletics license to pool its media rights (if not a full exemption). That’s a goal of many several influential college sports actors, and it would likely allow the sale of national deals superseding agreements like the Blue Devils’. Perhaps in this scenario, Duke men’s basketball on Amazon Prime would go the way of Penn football’s 1950s deal with ABC—quickly extinguished, but laying the foundation for a new home for its sport for decades to come.

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