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.
Inevitable, maybe just by being mostly in the Pacific Time Zone in today's TV environment. Since that could not change, then expanding eastward was probably always called for. If only...
It's interesting that some conferences are keeping their "regional" names yet recruiting institutions that shatter the geographical concept to smithereens. (I often what or how big a "smithereen" was, anyhow?)
I hear that the ACC is recruiting Stanford and Cal(?) as well. Anyway, here's an interesting take on who's behind all this smash-and-grab:
"Seeing what Disney was up to years ago, the Big 10 conference took matters into its own hands, setting up their own profitable cable TV system and carefully building the most lucrative of all multi-outlet TV situations, independent of Disney. The dunces who run the PAC 12 though, were not so smart, doing nothing while the TV money dried up. UCLA and USC eagerly took refuge in the Big 10 last year, and with six more leaving, it is virtually defunct."
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/disney_wrecks_college_football.html
But it's less unsettling to we old guys who *attended* UCLA when it was in the AAWU, then the PAC8, then the PAC10, then the PAC12 (I was just getting acclimated to that), and now it's what? The Big B.O.? B.O.-10? What?
..senility's a b*tch!