The Duke and Michigan men's basketball teams are expected to face off at a baseball stadium for a their highly anticipated nonconference Dec. 21 matchup.
According to CBS Sports, the game, which was previously slated for Madison Square Gardens, will now take place at the Miami Marlins' LoanDepot Park.
Michigan is the reigning national champion. Duke was last season's No. 1 overall NCAA Tournament seed.
Sources told CBS that chances of the game being moved were around 100%, noting that the "game is going to be played at the baseball stadium barring something drastic happening."
Another source stressed to CBS that there are still some critical final steps to making the basketball game in a baseball stadium a reality, but confirmed the game's fate was headed that way.
The reason for the change of venue came down to a broadcast rights dispute. In late April Duke announced a multi-year deal with Amazon that will pay the school millions of dollars in exchange for a three-game package of premium nonconference matchups. The Blue Devils are scheduled to face UConn in Las Vegas, Gonzaga in Detroit and, once likely Michigan in Miami next season.
The fact that Michigan and Duke hadn't signed a contract when the Amazon deal was announced was the reason for the move. This led to immediate pushback from Fox, sources said, because the network expected to retain the territorial broadcast rights.
"TV is paying a lot of money for this," one source told CBS, citing the Big Ten's media deal that goes through 2030 and pays more than $1 billion each year. "Schools got paid, the Big Ten got paid. This is Fox flexing its muscle and standing on principle."
CBS explains the situation as follows:
TV networks own the broadcast rights to conferences' non-league games, depending on where they are played. Fox is the Big Ten's primary television partner, so it has joint territorial media ownership to all games in states where Big Ten teams are based, in addition to a select batch of adjacent states, such as New York (i.e., MSG and the Barclays Center) and places like Louisville, Kentucky, and Washington, D.C.
While the ACC also has New York as a territory (due to Syracuse being in the league), the conference brokered a deal with Duke and ESPN to allow the Michigan game to be staged at MSG. The issue forcing the game to be moved is that Michigan did not initially have those same conversations with the Big Ten and its TV partners because Duke and Amazon were running point on the deal.
