There is excitement in all of this, and there is sadness. There is relief, and there is mortal terror fulfilled. There are questions, and there is certainty. It’s a weird night in the weird world of college sports.
We should start by offering Washington State, Oregon State, Stanford, and Cal our sincere condolences. Especially those first two, if we’re being honest. I’m not sure whether there’s anything either of them could have done—or rather, I know what they needed to do, but I wouldn’t know how to do it either were I in their shoes. Stanford and Cal had advantages galore and fumbled them, seemingly due to a lack of interest in carrying the ball. Washington State and Oregon State? It’s hard to think of two power conference schools where it’s more difficult to succeed. Remotely located, poorly financed, storied but not any more storied than anybody else, with ardent fanbases but small ones, Washington State and Oregon State had little to bring to the table besides being affable and likable and playing the role of an inspiring, overmatched underdog in annual matchups with the big brother program within their own state. To be honest? In 2021, I thought it would be Iowa State and Kansas State, the first of which I love. I am relieved. I am excited. I am also sad.
If I were to give three reasons for the Pac-12’s failures, they would be these three:
- The Pac-12 wasn’t good enough at football.
- The Pac-12 didn’t have enough dedicated fans.
- The Pac-12 had poor leadership.
On the first point, that the Pac-12 wasn’t good enough at football: The Pac-12 has won exactly one playoff game so far in the College Football Playoff era, and the winner of that game lost the championship by three touchdowns. This is true of the Big 12 as well (lot more touchdowns, too), but the differences there show up in the second and third points, which we’ll get to shortly.
Winning adds value. Winning draws revenue. Winning brings fans to stadiums and it puts games on TVs. The best way, the most surefire way to do well in a collection of sports where leagues and conferences are always changing, is to win. There are other factors, there is luck involved with timing, but winning is a good thing to do. It’s a large part of why Utah and TCU have both made it to the Big 12. It’s a large part of how Cincinnati got there. It’s a large part of why Texas and Oklahoma wanted to join the SEC rather than the Big Ten. The goal in college football—and football does drive all of this, because the most fans like football—is to win, and the Pac-12 didn’t do enough of that, and that started to create a product that wasn’t valued highly at a national level. UCLA and USC weren’t doing a lot of winning themselves by the time they left. But if they were in a league that was viewed as one of the best in the country, through their own performance or that of someone else, the conversation would have been different.
On the second point, that the Pac-12 didn’t have enough dedicated fans: Per D1 Ticker’s record keeping, the median Pac-12 school’s average home attendance in the 2022 season was 42,964 people. Arizona State and Colorado were that median. The Big 12? All ten of its schools had 43,076 attendees or more at an average home game. That includes Kansas. Even if you add the four new Big 12 members to the group, only Houston didn’t beat a single Pac-12 school. BYU beat ten. UCF beat four. Cincinnati beat three. The ACC—by no means a juggernaut in football, and reportedly a conference held together at the moment only thanks to the padlocks its lawyers put on the grant of rights—had a median number of 44,813, nearly two thousand people better than that of the Pac-12. The Pac-12’s best-attendance team was USC, 22nd nationally. Pac-12 football does not draw strong in-person attendance.
Making matters worse, Pac-12 football doesn’t get viewers to tune in. Part of why the Pac-12 Networks never soared is that college sports fans didn’t care enough to harass their cable providers about adding them to each package. Part of why the Pac-12’s proposed media deal this summer came in at two thirds the value of the Big 12’s from last summer is that broadcasters forecasted low fan interest in Pac-12 sports based on ratings over recent years. It’s not that the Pac-12 didn’t have good enough fans. It’s that the Pac-12 didn’t have enough good fans. Without national interest, you need local interest. The Pac-12 didn’t have either in sufficient quantity to get the money necessary for schools to justify continuing to stay together. None of the schools which left the conference left for the sake of leaving. Colorado didn’t lie awake at night pining for the Big 12. For each school’s leadership, an opportunity was there to provide their institution with money which dwarfed that which they’d get in the Pac-12, and in many cases the better-moneyed opportunity was connected to an opportunity to improve their institution’s national visibility and prestige. If the money had been there, if the competition level had been there, if USC could be a top national dog in this arrangement, USC would have loved continuing to travel to Seattle rather than Piscataway. If the money had been there, if the conference leadership had been there, if Arizona could feel confident in the possibility to build its brand rather than watching it recede, Arizona would have loved continuing to travel to Corvallis rather than Morgantown. At some point, though, it becomes negligent to pass up the money.
TV money doesn’t just materialize, either. It’s not pulled out of a hat. TV executives make mistakes, they’re not all-knowing, but the numbers they offer conferences are strongly correlated with the interest those conferences’ schools generate. If the Pac-12 had enough rabid fans, this wouldn’t have happened. It’s a harsh thing to say out loud, but it’s the truth.
On the third point, that the Pac-12 had poor leadership: Here is how much every former Pac-12 school will be making in its new TV deal, per reports…
- USC: $60M per year
- UCLA: $60M per year
- Washington: $35M–$40M per year
- Oregon: $35M–$40M per year
- Colorado: $32M per year
- Arizona: $32M per year
- Arizona State: $32M per year
- Utah: $32M per year
It’s unclear what Cal, Stanford, Washington State, and Oregon State will be making, but the fact that George Kliavkoff, likely the Pac-12’s final commissioner and a former TV businessman himself, was only able to find a deal worth $20M per school annually for the ten schools outside of USC and UCLA is madness. Even taking the low end of Washington and Oregon’s estimates, those remaining four schools would have had to have been worth only half a million dollars annually apiece for Kliavkoff’s deal to be finding the market value. Some of what happened is that the schools which left for the Big 12 got a very good deal, with ESPN and Fox making what turned out to be a losing bet, but Washington and Oregon’s numbers were determined this week. It’s unfathomable how bad the deal was that Kliavkoff brought to the table. Add in that he was blindsided by USC and UCLA leaving, add in that he failed to circle the wagons and regroup in the year after they left, add in that he was blindsided by Brett Yormark having the Big 12 negotiate its TV contracts a year early, add in that he brashly painted an incorrect picture of the situation right up until the final bell found him bloody on the mat, and you have a guy who managed to look bad even when juxtaposed with Larry ****ing Scott. Some of this is the schools themselves, Kliavkoff worked for the schools, but the TV deal is so illustrative of his overall incompetence in the role that it removes any reasonable doubt. He might be a fine man. He did a bad job. The schools that hired Brett Yormark, and Bob Bowlsby before him, survived. The schools that hired George Kliavkoff, and Larry Scott before him, did not.
Here’s who I think is happy with how this worked out:
- The Big 12, in totality, though those jilted would still prefer to not have been abandoned by Texas, Oklahoma, Texas A&M, Nebraska, Missouri, and Colorado (when Colorado abandoned them). Still not a great situation. The third league in a two-power system. College football’s middle class.
- The Mountain West, who recent reporting suggests could land Stanford and Cal through this in addition to the long-presumed additions of Washington State and Oregon State. The addition of Stanford would be game-changing for this league. We’ve theorized Stanford might consider itself too good to be formally associated with Fresno State, but if that isn’t the case, first off it makes us think more highly of Stanford because Fresno State rocks, but secondly it will give the Mountain West immense credibility in a huge number of sports. Stanford might not get a lot of people to its football games. Stanford might not be all that good at football. But boy oh boy, does Stanford pile up NCAA championship trophies.
Here’s who I think is unhappy:
- Core Big Ten fans who don’t like playing Rutgers and are fine with Washington and Oregon on a personal level but don’t really want to give up playing schools they actually care about.
- Utah and Arizona State, though they’re also probably relieved. At the very least, they should be.
- Washington State and Oregon State and whoever does care about Stanford and Cal.
- National fans who wish we all still associated ourselves more with our family and neighbors than with those with whom we share broad sociopolitical ideologies. (One way to identify a Big Ten-type school as opposed to an SEC-type school: Did they want to play football in 2020? For better or worse [almost entirely worse], that kind of sums up the culture war as it pertains to college sports.)
- Florida State, but that’s unrelated and possibly a product of their own overvaluing of themselves.
The question remains of what changed this morning after the overnight reports had Washington and Oregon backing down and rallying the Pac-9 or Pac-8 (Arizona’s situation was still in flux). My personal guess? I don’t think the sources for those reports were coming from Oregon. If they were coming from anywhere within those two, they were coming from Washington, the school perceived to be less supportive of sports and the school reported to be more concerned with the costs of Big Ten travel. It’s also possible they were coming from somewhere else altogether, somewhere like Arizona State where those in power badly wanted the Pac-12 to survive, or from the Pac-12 offices. A good thing to ask oneself when reading a news report is what the journalist making the report stands to gain if it’s published and what they stand to lose if it turns out incorrect. In this case, those reporting the Pac-12 might survive after all got themselves a whole lot of pageviews and other engagement. The risk? It played out, they were wrong, but it was predictably washed away as conference realignment craziness. I’m not accusing anyone of not vetting their sources, but when you’re not naming sources and you’re in a big race against the rest of your industry to get the report out fast, it becomes pretty darn easy to pass off things you shouldn’t believe as reports, because you can always blame your source if it’s wrong. This is especially easy if doing so boosts your business.
Beyond all of that: It’s sad. I get it, I’m nostalgic too, it’s sad. There is good which comes from conference realignment—TCU and Utah and UCF and Cincinnati and Louisville are mid-majors no more—but there is bad as well, and it’s not fair and it’s not simple and it’s not what fans would broadly choose if all of this was put to a vote. It’s especially sad for Oregon State and Washington State. You might not have great attendance, guys, and you might be far away from population centers in a literal corner of the country, and you might hardly ever be in the vicinity of the national championship picture, but dammit, you play chainsaw noises at your football games and you always get Ol’ Crimson on College Gameday. I hope you make the playoff out of the Mountain West. I hope you draw USC in the first game. I hope you beat the piss out of them and make your way to the Rose Bowl.
