THIS Is Why The Pac 12 Collapsed
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- Опубликовано: 20 сен 2024
- It was a sensitive subject when I was working for the conference, but I can share my thoughts now.
George Kliavkoff is officially out as the Pac-12 commissioner. He's going to get a lot of the heat for the conference folding, but I think that's unfair. The previous regime under Larry Scott deserve most of the blame for why the conference was ever in this position in the first place.
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Person most responsible: Larry Scott. School most responsible: Easily, USC. Wildcard responsible: ESPN
FOX is far more responsible than ESPN. They are the ones who ponied up to get the LA schools out of the conference, then once more for UW and UO.
Larry Scott was so clueless at running the conference. He destroyed the conference.
You left out the part where at the beginning of Covid… every major conference was desperate to play games except the PAC-12. The level of wokeness and arrogance from school Presidents and AD’s was a death sentence. Money grubbing with zero vision for the future… limp wrist’d fancy men and boss women ruined what took great men over 100 years to build.
yeah that was overlooked--hard to build program support with a 5 game season and skipping out on a bowl...
It just goes without saying that california is going to california.
It’s a different Big 12 with Texas gone. Now the conference is balanced and it feels like the old Big 8.
Losing Colorado wasn't a big deal. Oregon/Washington were ready to sign the PAC deal until the morning of when the deal was supposed to be finalized. The Big 10 came calling the day before and Oregon/Washington took the best option.
As an Oregon State fan, the circus of incompetency, idiocy, and complacency virtually gutted our (and WSU's) athletic programs.
Should have added 4 Big XII teams in the summer of 2021 after OU and Texas announced they were leaving for the SEC
Should have taken the deal they were offered. They declined and the Big12 grabbed the deal immediately after.
as bad as the Pac-12 leadership was you have to give props to the Big-12 since it looked pretty bad for them in 2021, but Brett Yormark schooled the Pac-12 and solidified their conference with pretty good additions in Houston, BYU, Cincy and UCF and a new media deal along with getting the 4 Pac-12 teams...
It’s so easy to blame Larry Scott.. but there’s something else to consider. (and blame) The 12 school presidents could’ve called for a vote, at ANY TIME, to fire Larry Scott. All it took was a vote and eat some contract money. They never voted. Didn’t even try. Didn’t even consider it. So blame the 12 leaders of the schools along with Scott. Maybe more than Scott.
Stanford and Cal in the Atlantic Coast Conference? Ain't that sorta, uh, stupid?
Great insight Max....You should have your own show on ESPN....
It's a shame to see the Pac 12 dissolve, but progress won't wait for incompetence.
The reason the PAC-12 folded can be summed up in four words: asleep at the wheel.
The first sign of this was the PAC’s continued reliance on a third party for creating schedules, rather than handling it in-house. Aside from being incredibly lazy, it led to a lot of scheduling irregularities that simply did not occur in other conferences. For example, USC and Stanford hosting Notre Dame at the end of the year meant that one team would be scrambling for an opponent in the final week of the season, yet the conference maintained a stubborn reluctance to play any other non-league games after September. It also took way too long for the conference to institute a policy of bye weeks prior to playing on the road on a weeknight, even though other conferences figured that out ten years earlier.
But it’s also important to realize that the University presidents were just as asleep at the wheel as the PAC-12 offices, not only enabling Larry Scott for several years too long (the Woody Dixon scandal was grounds for termination) but also for kneecaping the conference in DirecTV negotiations when they refused AT&T as an exclusive retailer as part of the deal.
And let’s not forget the conference passing on a $30 million-per-school deal with ESPN because a delusional PAC professor thought the members were still worth $50 million each even without the LA schools.
The ultimate causes of the PAC's demise:
a) Cultural/demo trends in the footprint.
b) Poor leadership.
The proximate causes of the demise:
a) Failing to recognize that USC was a flight risk
b) Overvaluing itself after USC/UCLA left
c) This resulted in no preemptive backfill and rejecting reasonable media deal offers.
If the PAC had accepted its reality, it could have poached the best options from the BIG12 remainders and accepted a Tier 2 media deal.
can't blame Colorado when the pac 12 office never came up with a TV deal
What makes this so ironic for Colorado is that they didn't leave the Big 12 only because of Texas like the other 3 schools that left claim but they saw the Pac 12 at the time the more stable conference in the future. After they won the 2001 Big 12 title in FB it was all downhill and it only got much worse in the Pac 12. Not one good thing happened to them during their time in the Pac 12. Then in a shocking twist of events they move back to the Big 12 when it turns out they were more stable in the aftermath of all this.
USC wanted out. Wanted unequal revenue sharing. Went to big ten and still didn’t get unequal sharing
Great stuff Max. Been subscribed for a few years, glad to have you back doing consistent content. Larry Scott killed the conference. Go Utes!
Larry Scott gets a lot of blame because of the greed involved, but he is not the only one. Think about the idea of Utah President Taylor Randall to ask for $50m per school, AFTER USC and UCLA announced they are leaving. Common sense would say without the LA TV market and the Conference “Bell Cow” ( USC), this is a major mistake. What happened next? ESPN walked away.
The PAC-12 collapsed ultimately because TV executives valued the schools individually higher in association with other regions. Keeping all the PAC-12 schools together brought down the value of each school because they all share the same weak points and flaws. Having games with relevance for fan bases in more passionate parts of the country will help attract more eyeballs to west coast schools.
max no one has told the deep dive on usc leaving . You have the access to tell that story
No it’s Larry!!! Nobody’s blaming George. Nobody!!!
Excellent analysis.
Max, I think you are understating the blame for George K. First Mike Bohn comes to USC and says everything is on the table. This should have been taken much more seriously. Second he wasted valuable time trying to lobby the California Board of Regents prevent UCLA from leaving for conference. Third as media expert he royally screwed up the negotiations with ESPN with a 50M/school counter offer which made ESPn leave the negotiations entirely. Fourth he spent six months and did not have any deal to present to university presidents and AD’s. This is partly why Colorado left was that they lost patience. Fifth, George K basically let the Big 12 mafia Twitter set the media narrative. Sixth why was a merger with Big 12 never pursued?
Yeah Scott deserves most of the blame but George K is major villain too
Yeah sure mostly
I mean football isn’t as important to people on the west coast. If it was the stadiums other than Autzen and Husky’s Stadium would be full
There’s truth to this, though both the stadiums you mentioned aren’t 100% full.
But I want you to understand that the west coast is usually ahead of trends, not behind them. The more honest comment is “football isn’t as important to students as it is to older people.” Part of the reason for things being the way they are is younger populations in western metro areas… and most of the Pac-12 institutions are dependent on those metro areas. Pro sports are as big here as anywhere… and we further pay more attention to, say, Major League Soccer. The latter is already successfully invading the south, surprisingly.
Point is that college football is going to be humbled… and needs to embrace that. I’m not sure this realignment frenzy is helping.
But he was well paid, I assume. Regardless of real life effective performance.
Cope harder.
$$$$$$$$
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