The latest entry into the Pac-12 finger-pointing exercise comes from the Los Angeles Times, which today published an extensively researched piece with a whole lot of details pertaining to how things got to where they are now. Some of those details haven’t been shared before. Others have been shared, but I personally had missed them. It’s worth a read, and it’s presently not behind a paywall, but I have two broad takeaways from it we’re going to deal with in here. The first is that university presidents might not be the best people to make conference alignment decisions. The second is that every powerholder in the Pac-12 has some complicity in this collective failure, and a whole darn lot of them are taking every opportunity they can to blame somebody else.
On the first takeaway:
“A lot of times, the way presidents’ rooms work, he or she who speaks the loudest and first kind of sets the dynamic,” a source with knowledge of the discussions recently told The Times. “And if there’s nobody else that has a real strong knowledge base or inclination to do something else, they say the person who has a real strong opinion must feel strongly for a reason.”
This quote was used as explanation for an incident in which Carol Folt, president at USC since July of 2019, reportedly stopped all expansion discussions dead in their tracks in the summer of 2021. The Times reports that one quarter of the way through an expansion presentation prepared by Pac-12 officials for a subcommittee of Pac-12 presidents, Folt halted the conversation to say the conference shouldn’t expand. It’s unclear if the presentation was finished, but the other five presidents on the committee—one from each travel pair (so one from Stanford/Cal, one from ASU/Arizona, one from Utah/Colorado, one from WSU/Washington, and one from OSU/Oregon)—didn’t push back hard enough for any pursuit of floundering Big 12 programs (or other alternatives) to happen, and a year later, USC left those five presidents high and dry, Folt and the Trojans galloping off to Chicago to join the Big Ten.
It’s a pattern that repeats itself throughout the article: Pac-12 officials try to do something smart, one university president suggests doing something dumb instead, the other presidents respectfully defer to the confident idiot. This is how the Pac-12 came to make that $50M per year per school counteroffer which led ESPN to end negotiations. One president worked with a professor at their university to come up with that number, and the rest of the presidents either believed them or misunderstood how insulting the gesture was to ESPN’s negotiators’ collective intelligence.
When reason does surface from the Pac-12 in the piece, it doesn’t come from any presidents. The most grounded moment described is one in which Washington football coach Kalen DeBoer takes a stand against the proposed Apple TV deal, with the assumption being that he probably rightfully thought playing no conference games on cable or network television would decimate his program’s ability to recruit. This, too, is telling: Could this whole mess have been avoided if those who understood the reality at hand pushed back against those who didn’t? Individuals apparently held a lot of power in this environment. In fact, the article gives credit for Washington and Oregon nearly accepting the Apple TV deal to Phil Knight, who saw a chance for the Pac-12 to try something new and innovative with a sexy West Coast brand and evidently salivated, recruiting and finances be damned.
What would a good university president have done in this situation? Found an expert and trusted them. It appears that when this happened, it was not the norm. Credit to presidents at Washington, Colorado, and Arizona. This article makes Washington’s look relatively good, at least at the end, and Colorado and Arizona have looked like they at the very least came to their senses in time, even if they were presumably part of the dysfunction themselves.
On the second takeaway:
The article seems to have relied on a lot of Pac-12 officials as sources, going so far as to paint Kliavkoff as some sort of master negotiator for spending so much time trying to use the UC Board of Regents to force UCLA to stay in the league, a “deal” which would have reportedly required the Bruins to make something like twice as much revenue from the TV contracts as the rest of Pac-12 universities (the number the regents wanted was $50M per year for UCLA) and would have forced the non-UCLA schools in the league to pay UCLA’s Big Ten exit fee, since documents had already been signed. Obviously, this fell apart. Oregon was reportedly unwilling to give up a sixth of its TV revenue and also pay a tithe to the Big Ten in order to hold on to a rival who just jilted them. How rude of Oregon.
This isn’t the first time one party has gotten a platform and used it to machine-gun blame at their colleagues. Kirk Schulz, Washington State president, gave a far-reaching interview to ESPN recently in which he blamed everybody else. Scott Barnes, Oregon State athletic director, gave a far-reaching interview to The Athletic which ran today in which he blamed everybody else. Various sources have said Oregon led the Big Ten’s northwestern charge while others have pointed at Washington. The Arizona/Arizona State departure or lack thereof was briefly placed, by sources, in the hands of a board of regents there who are not particularly well-known. Read one big account of the implosion and Kliavkoff is made to look like a buffoon. Read another and Kliavkoff’s hands were tied by imbeciles. (Brett Yormark was complimentary of Kliavkoff yesterday the Marchand and Ourand Sports Media Podcast, describing him as gracious in their recent interactions.) Nobody is taking responsibility aside from maybe Kliavkoff in some respects, but it’s not like he’s out here giving mea culpas.
I don’t need self-flagellation. I don’t expect that. To some extent, that would be dumb. This is a posturer’s game. But I would like us, we the consumers, to consume this while being mindful of the fact that nearly every single person involved in a powerholding capacity in the Pac-12 during its downfall contributed to that downfall, and that all of them are now anonymously making as many excuses as they possibly can. Hell, the Times article even halfheartedly pinned the whole league sucking at football for the last ten years on USC’s NCAA sanctions. Those were in 2010! Ohio State won a national championship two years after theirs! And what say the other eleven of you? Why does USC have to do all the winning in this league?
The Times article is great. It relies on multiple sources for most if not all of its claims (I didn’t parse each one), and it gives specifics. It’s good old-fashioned reporting, not the growing practice in which self-aggrandizing journalists let a source release a PR statement without making him attach his name. But boy, between Pac-12 officials and Pac-12 presidents, there were a whole lot of dumb people in here making big, dumb decisions. And now they each want to blame all the others.
The Marcus Stroman Hole
It was an extremely good night for the Chicago Cubs, and that is saying a lot. Because well before Michael Fulmer and Christopher Morel’s heroics, the Cubs got news that Marcus Stroman is going to be out a long time. The rib issue which flared up as he tried to return from his hip issue is fractured cartilage, and that could take a while to heal.
In the meantime, it probably means a return to the rotation for Drew Smyly, which isn’t the worst thing in the world. Smyly’s been struggling, but asking him to give three or four serviceable innings every fifth day isn’t absurd. He’s a professional, much like Stroman, and while he isn’t at his best right now, the Cubs have been obscenely lucky to get as much out of him as they have in his time in Wrigleyville. But, you would prefer to have five starters who make you feel confident, and Smyly does not inspire confidence right now.
The next men up after Smyly are, in order, Hayden Wesneski, Jordan Wicks, and Ben Brown. Wesneski hasn’t been great himself, though he continues to flash some great potential, while Wicks isn’t on the 40-man roster yet and Brown is recovering from a lat injury, which is not a reassuring injury to be recovering from. The options are thin, and while Wicks probably has the most upside right now, a rising prospect who has yet to see the Major Leagues, a Smyly/Wesneski piggyback is therefore a perfectly reasonable approach.
It’s not good. It’s bad for the Cubs, it should lower their rotation WAR by a win or so over the rest of the year. But it’s worth remembering how lucky the Cubs are to have gotten this far before scraping the bottom. They built a rotation on two 2nd to 4th starters (Stroman, Jameson Taillon) and a collection of lottery tickets. Justin Steele’s numbers hit. Javier Assad’s numbers have been hitting. For a long time, Smyly’s numbers hit. Wesneski’s didn’t, but that is a pretty great success rate for starting pitcher scratchoffs.
So, what would we say to someone fearing this is mournful news for the Cubs? Keep enjoying the ride. We’re lucky this sort of setback didn’t come sooner, and these are the vulnerabilities teams face while they’re still on the ascent. We’ll have plenty of time in October or (this would be cool) November to talk about the risks of signing Mike Clevinger and whether the Cubs should go hard after Shane Bieber or Aaron Nola. For now, let’s just hope Smyly and Wesneski deal.
Jonathan Toews Says Goodbye
As Stu’s been mentioning (he has more on Morel, by the way), we’re in Chicago for a few days this week, and the euphoria of last night’s victory combined with a day spent walking from Wicker Park through River North to the Magnificent Mile is a good way to get nostalgic about this beautiful, big-shouldered city. So, it’s a good time to appreciate Jonathan Toews’s farewell to Blackhawks fans. It’s not a surprise that it’s here, but it brings back some really fun memories, even for those of us who were so late to the Blackhawks bandwagon that we could only ever conscience internally hopping on.
