The Pac-12's Death was Inevitable Yet Depressing
The nation's preeminent west coast conference is on death's doorstep after the latest round of realignment.
I’ve been in the mountains the past few weeks, taking my yearly sabbatical to refresh before both the school year and sports year begins, which means it was an appropriate time for the college sports landscape to blow up the way it did.
The Pac-12 is effectively no more. Over the last few weeks, six schools have left the conference, with Colorado opening the floodgates immediately following Pac-12 Media Days while Oregon, Washington, Utah, Arizona, and Arizona State sought lifeboats after conference commissioner George Kliavkoff finally presented a TV deal to the university presidents. It’s an ignominious end to what was the preeminent west coast conference, a situation that has a multitude of villains to blame for the events that occurred and one that ultimately had a feeling of inevitability. There is no singular cause as to why this happened, but the avalanche was not going to be stopped no matter what individuals tried to do.
If you wanted to try and pinpoint blame, you likely need to start with late-stage capitalism. Or, in a more palatable sense, you need to start with the TV network executives who essentially orchestrated this series of events. The changing television landscape has placed an ever-increasing importance on live sporting events as a way to draw in viewers and advertising dollars, but TV executives finally realized that not every game in college football is worth the same dollar amount. It was ESPN that pushed the SEC to consolidate its brand power by grabbing Oklahoma and Texas while shifting all of their programming to their channels, while Fox (with the aid of NBC and CBS) fired a shot across the bow by getting UCLA and Southern Cal to leave their regional home for more money and exposure in the Big Ten, creating two massive conferences with the brand power to command major television contracts. In the wake of these moves, and general cost-cutting across the board, other conferences like the Pac-12 saw their theorized increases in revenue go away. In a prescient but nonetheless terrifying move, the Big 12 opted to negotiate an extension of their current deal at the same price as before, which gave the conference stability while also revealing how far down the pecking order everyone else outside the Big Two were.
UCLA and Southern Cal are not blameless here either. Sure, they were not the first major brands to jump conferences during this latest round of realignment, but at least Oklahoma and Texas could claim some regional similarities. Putting two schools in a conference based in the Midwest never made sense outside of a monetary standpoint, and while the money and exposure are likely far higher than what the schools would have seen had they remained in the Pac-12, it still ignores the logistical nightmare it has created for all student-athletes at the schools (who, I will note, will not be sharing in the increased profits generated by the move).
Conference leadership in the Pac-12 has been inept for a long time, and that streak begins with Larry Scott. We could make a laundry list of errors Scott made, so let’s do that:
Scott clearly misread the television industry by signing a long television deal with the intent of holding all content rights at the end of it, as this longevity deprived the conference of any sort of flexibility to adapt to a changing media landscape.
The Pac-12 Network, for all the good it did in airing non-revenue sports, was not even available in a majority of homes in the West Coast market, as clear a sign as any that Scott failed to generate exposure for his programs. And this is to say nothing of the horrible decision to base the network on expensive land in the Bay Area instead of getting cheaper land in a space like Las Vegas.
Various failures to expand and strengthen the conference, from the original Pac-16 that would have added Texas and Oklahoma to the conference to a more recent expansion effort a few years ago that would have brought in some Big 12 schools in the aftermath of Red River going to the SEC.
All the various gaffes, such as his enormous base salary to his private suites in Vegas during the Pac-12 Conference Championship games, all served to erode public confidence in his leadership.
George Kliavkoff also deserves blame here, as he executed a TV negotiation strategy that was as unrealistic to the current market as anything else. John Canzano reported on Friday that ESPN put an offer on the table in the fall of 2022 for $30 million a year, essentially the same as the Big 12, and the Pac-12 returned with a counteroffer of $50 million, which is in line with the SEC. I’m not sure if this was a case of hubris or the conference really not understanding their worth, but ESPN walked away at that point. Even the proposed Apple TV deal that was presented to the university presidents right before everyone left showed how little Kliavkoff and his crew understood the college spots landscape; he had a deal that could theoretically get the conference well past the Big 12 if subscriber numbers were met, but the lack of exposure would have killed the programs remaining in the conference.
This all sucks. It sucks that the Pac-12 could never adapt to the changing sports landscape both on and off the field, and it sucks that the conference is dying as a result. UCLA, Southern Cal, and everyone else will state that they had to leave in order to secure the futures of their athletic departments, and it will remain a true statement, but it will only be true in absentia because it leaves out the part that all parties hold some modicum of blame for the current situation.
It also creates a fascinating final season for every sport. The stakes were raised across the board, as now whoever wins each individual sport will go down as the final Pac-12 Champion in history. And yes, the conference may continue to shamble on in some zombified form after this year, but everyone will know that it is not the same conference.
The Conference of Champions is dead. Long live the Pac-12.
Not to say I told you so, but...
https://www.themightybruin.com/p/the-physics-of-college-football-expansion
I actually had written most of that article over two years previously (maybe it was even for a once proud flagship, but sadly now defunct, Bruin fan blog) but never got around to polishing it and publishing it. The point of this is not to brag - much - but more so to point out that if some middle aged couch potato in Colorado could see this coming, surely the multi-million dollar salaried commissioners of the Pac-12 Conference and their staffs should have had an inkling that this was a possibility. What an enormous dumpster fire of incompetent and arrogant morons, and what an ignominious end to a storied conference that deserved a better fate.
But the SPTRs may soon be unemployed. So, every cloud does have a silver lining.
I forget if it was the Times or one of the North Cal newspapers, but a decade ago, I read an interview article with Larry Scott when he was putting his grandiose plans into effect. His arrogance was alarming and it was clear in his words that he was so committed to his vision, that his beliefs had become truths to him, while the rest of the world saw him as a fraud.
It was pretty clear then that he was taking the Pac-12 down a very slippery one-way road. His creation of the Pac-12 network was remarkably dumb. He poured billions into a network without first attempting to understand and identify the revenue ceiling the network would generate from carriage fees from cable and satellite providers. Who in their right mind would build a network before securing revenue contracts? Who in their right mind would build a network without first identifying the size of their subscriber base? While making himself one of, if not the highest paid commissioner in the country?
Duh.
As Einstein said, the only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance. That pretty much sums up Larry Scott. He was brilliant in his arrogance to the point where he blinded himself and everyone else in the room who worked with him, including his team, university presidents, chancellors, and AD's.
The Pac-12 has nobody to blame but themselves by placing a child to do a man's job.