Did The Pac-12 Have To Resort To This?

By Kyle Golik

If you watch and listen to our podcast Outside The Gridiron every Wednesday evening, we end with our Final Thoughts. My recent Final Thoughts was to try to drum up support for the Pac-12’s remaining brands Washington State and Oregon State as they navigate the murky waters that lie ahead. They are legitimately Power 4 programs that have been cast away because television networks, namely FOX and ESPN, don’t find them worthy of being associated with the power brands of college football.

With the breaking news that Fresno State, Colorado State, Boise State, and San Diego State will be joining the Pac-12, the victory lap of new Pac-12 commissioner Teresa Gould should be celebrated by her and everyone involved to get the Pac-12 up from the ashes.

My colleague Brett Daniels outlined the slew of options to get the Pac-12 from six teams that will participate in the league in 2026.

This column is not meant to put down the new schools, the initiatives of Gould, or the motivations of Washington State and Oregon State. It really comes down to the teams who are no longer there, who looked down on the teams that Washington State and Oregon State are choosing to collaborate with that doomed the league.

When Utah head coach Kyle Whittingham met with John Canzano , Whittingham had a vision of where college football is heading.

“I think there is a major realignment coming, and it’ll be a big one. I think it will create even more of a divide and exclusivity for the teams that are on the right side of that line. 20 months to four years? How about that for a time frame? In my opinion, it’s going to look very much like an NFL minor league.”

If Whittingham believed and shared that vision with Utah administrators and if they believed in it, it may be a reason Utah was a primary driver in rejecting initial offers former George Kliavkoff brought to the university presidents. On that, Utah president Taylor Randall said

“The Pac-12 Presidents and Chancellors worked collectively in pursuit of a new media rights agreement. Though an offer was made by one of our media partners, we elected to take the rights to market to get the best deal. Throughout the process, many of the CEOs — including myself — pushed to ensure that the conference was aggressive to secure the very best agreement we could. Several conference schools retained their own consultants to value the league, which resulted in a range of estimations. It is my understanding that any mention of $50 million, which was higher than any valuation, was only as a potential starting point in negotiations to help get us to the estimated true value.”

There were similar sentiments shared by Washington president Ana Mari Cauce . Cauce bore some responsibility but also was skeptical of the $50 million figure saying she did not “believe many of us expected that we would obtain a basic media-rights offer of $50 million, regardless of what counteroffer was proposed.”

There is Randall and Cauce’s viewpoint, and then there was what Kliavkoff understood, or in this case misunderstood. According to one anonymous Pac-12 university president to Canzano , “The instructions were to negotiate. This wasn’t supposed to be a ‘take your ball and go home’ scenario.”

If some university presidents felt a starting point was $50 million per year, and some felt that wasn’t feasible, everyone wasn’t on the same sheet of music. When ESPN offered to pay $30 million per Pac-12 school, coupled with Kliavkoff’s negligence of failing to negotiate, it was the perfect storm that began to divide the Pac-12 where schools were beginning to seek refuge in other conferences.

It makes you wonder even less how the Pac-12 missed the boat so bad on the SMU. SMU is looking to invest millions to be back into relevancy, they raised $159 million over the last three years and are foregoing nine years of television revenue. This is a school situated in Dallas which is the No. 5 TV market, the most fertile recruiting territory in the United States, with billionaires willing to throw a lot of money into it in an era of NIL.

The big picture was missed there. It was missed when over a decade ago they could have had half the Big XII that included Texas and Oklahoma. The Pac-12 Network was a giant miss and missed revenue opportunity. The missed opportunities of figuring out the discontent of Southern California and UCLA could have been fixed. The missed opportunities to realize a future in streaming, something Arizona State president Michael Crow described as "a technological 23rd-century 'Star Trek' thing,” and other media opportunities made the decision easy for Oregon and Washington.

By all accounts, Washington looked to Oregon to lead on the situation. It was reported Oregon wanted to try to make it work in the Pac-12 but when they began to weigh the factors of stability of the Big Ten, access to the College Football Playoff, and wanting to fulfill mega donor Phil Knight’s dream of a national championship. It realized the Big Ten answered all the questions while the Pac-12 hardly could answer any.

In a lot of ways, this column may sound like I am coming across crying over spilled milk. There is a little of that. Take my feelings out of it, it is hard to dispute the Pac-12, Oregon State, and Washington State were put in a precarious position because predecessors weren’t able to fully convey the bigger picture.

Maybe if Utah had a clue or a realization of the situation, maybe the Pac-12 adds a SMU, San Diego State, maybe open to including BYU or Boise State and is intact.

Current Pac-12 Commissioner Teresa Gould, Oregon State AD and President Scott Barnes and Jayathi Murthy, former and current Washington State AD Pat Chun and Anna McCoy along with WSU President Kirk Schulz are trying to keep the integrity of collegiate athletics in the Pacific Northwest. They have demonstrated humility, whether it was humble pie served or they had it all along. The Pac-12 may not have the brands it once had, but the passion of wanting to build something of like minds, long term partnerships will bode well for Pac-12 2.0, it also didn’t have to be this way either and both can be true.