Leaders' arrogance and envy doomed the Pac-12

The more we learn about the Pac-12’s demise last week, the more avoidable it seems. 

It took years of bad decisions, poor leadership and no small amount of bad luck to go from one of the best brands in college sports to the verge of extinction. But who knew that a 108-year-old institution could be brought down in the end by nothing more complicated than arrogance and envy? 

A new piece of information Friday from longtime Portland-based columnist John Canzano suggests that less than a year ago, the Pac-12 could have signed a media rights deal with ESPN for $30 million per school. According to Canzano’s source, commissioner George Kliavkoff was instructed by his league’s presidents to turn down that offer and counter at $50 million.

That was the end of the negotiation. Instead, the Big 12 signed with ESPN last fall and the Pac-12 struggled to get much traction with other networks over the ensuing months. The best option Kliavkoff had to present to those same presidents was a streaming deal with Apple, whose riches would be tied to how many subscriptions the Pac-12 package could sell.

Days later, six of the 10 members jumped to other leagues, where they will make slightly more than the $30 million per school they could have reportedly secured last year. It’s unclear where the four remaining schools — Stanford, Cal, Washington State and Oregon State — will play in 2024, but it’s virtually certain their budgets will be hit hard.

In retrospect, the Pac-12’s leadership didn’t merely fail to anticipate the financial headwinds that would force cable companies to become a bit more choosy about how they spent their money. The bigger sin was misunderstanding who the Pac-12 should actually be competing against. 

Turning down ESPN’s offer last fall, if accurate, suggests that Pac-12 presidents thought their league was closer in value to the SEC and Big Ten, even without USC and UCLA, than what the Big 12 could offer without Texas and Oklahoma. 

By the time reality finally set in, it was too late.

Why did the Pac-12 fall apart while the Big 12 was in position to survive, thrive and ultimately expand? Because the Big 12 had no illusion that it was going to command a similar payday to the SEC and Big Ten, whose distributions will be well above $50 million per school when their new deals kick in. It just needed enough to allow its schools to compete, so it signed pretty much the same deal that the Pac-12 reportedly could have had last fall.

Think the Pac-12 presidents would like a mulligan on that one? 

In the end, Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah should fit in well as Big 12 members and will benefit from recruiting in Texas. Washington and Oregon should eventually make significantly more as Big Ten members.

But it would not be surprising if, a decade from now, all of them have some buyer’s remorse about letting the Pac-12 die. The travel is going to be brutal. Longstanding rivalries are going to be missed. And competitively, there’s a good chance that they all wished they had an easier path to the College Football Playoff. 

COLLEGE CHAOS:Who’s to blame for college football conference realignment mayhem?

There will be volumes written and documentary films made about how college sports got so off track during this century, but so much of it boils down to administrators becoming convinced — and thus convincing fans — that the financial scoreboard was more important than winning and losing games. 

As recently as a dozen years ago, West Virginia was a perennial top-25 team that sometimes got into the national title conversation because it could win the Big East. It has made more money in the Big 12 but been utterly irrelevant on the field. 

Nebraska, for all its problems, was often winning nine and 10 games before it joined the Big Ten. It has had seven losing seasons in the last eight years. 

Texas A&M has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to SEC-ify itself and is still waiting for the payoff.

More often than not, this has been the pattern of conference realignment: Those who leave to chase dollars tend to win fewer games and become less of a factor nationally than they were before.

Had the Pac-12 survived, Oregon and Washington and perhaps a few others would have had a clear path to the Playoff almost every year. In the Big Ten, they’ll have to go through Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, Wisconsin and the rest. 

That’s why maybe everyone — looking specifically at you, Florida State — should pause for a moment and take a deep breath before further wrecking the foundation upon which all of this is built. 

With the Pac-12 now scattered to the wind, the ACC is the next league that could endure an existential crisis thanks to a media deal that will leave its schools $20 million or more annually behind its SEC and Big Ten counterparts.

Florida State officials have been especially vocal in recent months about looking for an exit ramp if it can’t close the gap. Clemson and Miami are also notably antsy. 

If the ACC were to lose those three programs — the only three that have won national football titles in the modern era — it would no longer be viable as a power conference. It is why those schools believe they should be making more than the Wake Forests and Dukes of the world, and also why they look at the financial gap and worry about the ability to compete on a national stage with the SEC and Big Ten.

But the actual evidence suggests they have it backwards. Do you know who else makes the same amount of SEC money as Alabama, Georgia and LSU? Kentucky, Vanderbilt and Arkansas. They may get a bigger check than Florida State and Clemson, but their prospects of ever making a College Football Playoff are significantly smaller. 

Everything about conference realignment has told us that schools are better off in leagues where they have the advantages. They win more games, go deeper in the postseason and have happier fan bases. 

And yet we’ve seen so many schools give that up, from Oklahoma to Southern Cal and now to Oregon and Washington because they are more focused on what they aren’t getting than on what they already have. 

That attitude spelled the demise of the Pac 12, even though every one of its members would probably be more prosperous competitively by remaining in that league. Others should pay careful attention before going down the same path.