The Pac-12, one of the nation’s Power Five athletic conferences, died last Friday.
Some are even pinpointing the time of death — 7 a.m. The presidents and chancellors of the member universities were supposed to assemble in emergency session at that breakfast hour to vote on a last-ditch media deal that optimists hoped would save the 108-year-old conference.
But the vote didn’t happen because two of the league’s football heavies, Oregon and Washington, failed to show. Word trickled out that instead of joining an effort to save the conference they were members of, they had joined a different conference — the Big Ten.
That news sent three other conference members — Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah — sprinting for the lifeboats. By Friday night, those three Four Corners schools had joined the Big 12.
In one day, the Pac-12, which really was a Pac-9 at that point (UCLA and USC had agreed to leave for the Big Ten last summer, effective in 2024, and Colorado departed for the Big 12 on July 27), had been reduced to a Pac-4, turning Stanford, Cal, Oregon State, and Washington State into athletic orphans looking for a foster conference.
Said Michael Crow, president of Arizona State, “Once Oregon and Washington decided to go to the Big Ten, the (Pac-12) conference was no longer viable. You can’t be in a non-viable position for more than a few hours in our minds. We resolved that. You have two teams not present and no media contract, you’ve got to act.”
ASU acted. Now, instead of staying in the West to play geographical rivals of long standing like Stanford and the Oregon schools, they’ll be shipping their tennis and golf teams — and all their other Olympic sports teams — to Morgantown, West Virginia, and Orlando, among other distant locations, for matches. All for the sake of retaining some semblance of football viability.
The Media Deal That Wasn’t
Fingers of blame can be pointed in numerous directions. Pac-12 “powers” in the two big sports, football and men’s basketball, have in recent years bombed on the national stage. Only one football team has made it to the championship game in the College Football Playoff era — Oregon, following the 2014 season. Indeed, not since USC’s 2004 team (Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush, et al.) has the conference won a football championship; men’s basketball must return to the 1997 Arizona Wildcats to see a conference member hoist the national championship trophy.
The big money maker, though, is football. And the conference’s epicene approach to the COVID season — 2020 — told the world what it thought of football. It suspended all fall sports, including football, in August, only to be shamed by aggressive leagues like the Southeastern Conference (SEC), and even the slightly more adventurous Big Ten, to at least go through the motions. It began a rump football season on Nov. 6, in which each school played seven conference games with no fans (and some, because of virus cancellations, fewer even than that — ASU played four).
The Pac-12 did not seem to want to play football with the big boys, and that lack of gumption, along with the late start times of West Coast games, which cut into TV audiences, cooled big media on cutting a big rights check to the conference.
And without a hefty media rights deal, conference survival was doomed. The conference’s $3 billion, 12-year deal with ESPN and Fox expires next year, so the clock on a new deal has been ticking rather loudly for some time. What conference commissioner George Kliavkoff was able to solder together was a tier-based, primarily streaming arrangement with Apple TV+, in which schools would reap greater payouts the more subscriptions the conference netted. Each member school would pull in a figure in the low $20 millions.
Ana Mari Cauce, president of the University of Washington, griped about the deal: “When you have a deal that people are saying one of the best aspects of it is, ‘you can get out in two years,’ that tells you a lot.”
Streaming may be the future, but right now, today, jocks who want to show their athletic chops to a nation of sports fanatics, not to mention pro scouts, need ESPN, Fox, and the nets to do so.
As for the money side of the deal — you could dig $20 million out of the creases in the office couches of the NIL collectives at Texas and Texas A&M. The fact is: the media rights deals of the other Power Five conferences pay member schools more — way more — than $20 mill. The Big Ten will be doling out $100 million per school beginning in 2025; SEC member schools reap between $60 million and $70 million per year. Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) schools get almost $40 million a year, while Big 12 schools, including the four newbies from the Pac-12, will be garnering $31.7 million.
Oregon and Washington will reportedly reap less than full shares of Big Ten media money for a few years, but that is still more than the Pac would have paid them. One report puts their yearly payout at $40 million plus.
Also attractive to schools wanting to bolt: none of the departees will be subject to an exit fee because the Pac’s media deal expires at the end of the upcoming season.
Getting What We Wished For
So, it’s money killing the college game, is it?
Well, it is money that is fueling the conference reshuffle. Whether it’s killing college football is a different question.
It is bringing in the era of the superconference and all that entails. It is only another step or two until the major college football world is winnowed to 60, or 50, or 40 schools and two or three major conferences.
What that means is a lot of great Saturday matchups. The West Coast takeover by the Big Ten gives us a slate of prospective contests like Oregon–Ohio State, Michigan–USC, Penn State–Washington. Huge games with guaranteed huge ratings.
The downside? It is antithetical to what college sports have historically been about. It destroys geographical rivalries. It puts many road games out of the reach of fans, who used to be able to drive three or four hours to a take in a game their team plays on the road. It mocks the whole student side of the student athlete.
Non-football athletes have become unwitting victims in this drive for TV eyeballs, as now they travel cross-country to play golf or tennis or volleyball or field hockey.
Conference loyalty is out the window. I used to root for Big 12 teams just because my team was a Big 12 team. No longer will I do that. I don’t even know which teams are in the Big 12 anymore.
The national pundits are almost universally opposed to the decimation of the Pac-12. Here’s an apt postmortem from Pat Forde:
In college sports, there are no regions. There are no loyalties. And now there is no West, in terms of having its own home base and cultural center. There is only one holistic system of systems, and the system is driven by choices people make when they turn on the TV on Saturday afternoons.
Big ratings rule everything. Lousy ratings are lethal. Write it on the Pac-12’s tombstone.
But, seriously, who hasn’t seen any of this coming? The elite pundits, and many fans, have pushed interminably for paying athletes to play, and now athletes are paid to play (in the form of name, image, and likeness, which are used as recruiting inducements). They have exhorted the powers that be to install a national playoff system, which was instituted, in 2014, with four teams. Then they pushed them to increase it to 12 teams, which will begin in the 2024 season. A few years from now, they’ll push it to 16 teams.
All this is turning the college game into the NFL Lite, and it will become more NFL-like with every departure from its traditional iteration. Soon players will be official employees and will unionize, and we can memory-hole the whole idea of student athletes.
We will have gotten what we wished for.
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