College basketball has drawn its share of headlines over the last few days.

On top of NCAA tournament expansion, Duke raised eyebrows with its multiyear agreement with Amazon to broadcast a handful of high-major matchups next season.

Exact terms of the deal have been hard to come by, but what we do know includes:

• Duke will play games against UConn in Las Vegas, Michigan in New York City and Gonzaga in Detroit.
• To sell the package to Amazon, the school also committed to participate in “select additional ESPN owned and operated men’s basketball neutral-site events across the 2027-28 and 2028-29 seasons,” per the release. Details on those are TBD.

To pull this off, Duke needed the blessing of the ACC office — which oversees non-conference scheduling for member schools and has strict regulations — and ESPN. That’s a hell of a needle to thread considering the exclusivity around these kinds of rights.

One important caveat — the games were not sold directly by Duke to Amazon, sources briefed on the matter told SBJ. Third-party brokers served as intermediaries in each game’s case, which were then subsequently sold to Amazon.

Sources I spoke with characterized the deal as essentially a replacement for a multi-team event. So, instead of playing a couple games in, say, the Maui Invitational, Duke created and packaged three high-major matchups.

Multi-team event broadcasts by non-league partners is not unprecedented. North Carolina has played in the CBS Sports Champions Classic every year since 2014 and will do so through 2029. That said, Duke taking the initiative to create matchups and package them for a streamer is a different thing entirely.

It is also worth noting Amazon Head of Sports Partnerships Charlie Neiman is a former Duke water polo player.

The first place my brain jumped to was, “What happens when Florida State wants to sell its annual football game against Florida to Fox and pocket the profits?”

Sources I spoke with pushed back on the notion Duke’s agreement as a crack in the armor around the exclusivity of media rights. However, it’s hard to imagine people in the industry aren’t looking at trying to pull off something similar.

Still, why couldn’t Alabama football add two marquee non-conference matchups and sell them to Apple TV? Could South Carolina women’s basketball put together a series against UConn, UCLA and NC State and sell it to Hulu?

USC and Notre Dame tried with their annual football matchup before the Big Ten put the kibosh on it.

What Duke pulled off is novel and creative. Is it going to add another $100 million annually to the budget? No. But it’s a different way of thinking — and you’d be hard-pressed to believe there won’t be imitators in the market.