By Mickey Shuey
Indiana Business Journal
The Indiana Sports Corp. hopes it can ward off potential newcomers to the Big Ten Conference to keep the league’s annual football championship game in Indianapolis, where it has been played since its inception in 2011.
ISC, which oversees the state’s sports strategy, is expected to submit a bid to the Big Ten ahead of an end-of-day Friday deadline that will allow Lucas Oil Stadium to remain host of the game from 2025 to 2028.
The group also is submitting a bid to the conference for its 2025 and 2027 men’s and women’s basketball championships.
Sarah Myer, chief marketing officer for ISC, said this bid cycle is expected to be more competitive than in years past because of the addition of West Coast teams like UCLA, University of Southern California, Oregon and Washington.
“We acknowledge that there is going to be unique competition this year, versus years prior, because of the additions,” she said. “But what we really pride ourselves on is our experience in hosting, not just this event, but obviously a lot of major sporting events. We have the largest sports commission in the country, and we’re able to provide those resources from the start of planning to the execution throughout the week of the game itself.”
Las Vegas has already been mulled as a future home for the game, with reports surfacing in August that the Big Ten was in talks to move the event there and had asked the city to submit proposals.
For Indianapolis, the Big Ten Football Championship often serves as a capstone for each year’s major sporting events. It often brings 65,000 fans to the city and generates $25 million or more in economic impact, Myer said.
The Big Ten in recent years has been less reliant on Indianapolis for its other two flagship championships, the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.
The men’s hoops tournament moved to Chicago this year, while the women’s was played in Minneapolis. Both tournaments will be held in Minneapolis in 2024. The move came after Indianapolis opted not to bid on those years.
Indianapolis is only bidding on the 2025 and 2027 tournaments because there were scheduling difficulties for the other two years.
The city has hosted the Big Ten’s men’s basketball tournament 13 times and the women’s tournament 25 times over the past 29 years, including both events during the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 seasons. The women’s tournament was in Indianapolis every year since 2015 until its shift to Minneapolis.
Indianapolis will host this year’s football title game on Dec. 2, while next year’s will be played Dec. 7. The Big Ten will decide sometime this winter which cities will host that game—and the basketball tournaments—after 2024.
