Cue the dirge.
When Colorado bolted from the Pac-12 last week to rejoin the Big 12 effective in 2024, the common wisdom throughout College Football Nation was that this was it, the tolling of the death knell for the West Coast’s Power Five conference. One or more of the Four Corners schools would be the next to go, Oregon and Washington would either seek refuge in the Big Ten or would join the exodus to the Big 12, and the leftover schools might as well apply for Mountain West Conference membership.
And did current Commissioner George Kliavkoff, seemingly way too casual at Pac-12 Football Media Day with his “nothing to see here” comments about the inability to nail down a media rights deal that would keep the group together, surpass Larry Scott as the worst commissioner in the conference’s history? Discuss.
This is, remember, a sport whose fans and observers overreact as a matter of course. Colorado’s defection re-started the prophecies of doom, and many of those ready to shovel dirt on the Pac-12 seemed way too gleeful. Draw your own conclusions.
And the suspense builds. There is a conference meeting scheduled for Tuesday to discuss the details of a media rights deal, as originally reported by Substack columnist John Canzano and confirmed by The Associated Press.
There is also an Arizona Board of Regents meeting scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. Purportedly, it’s to discuss a “review of assignments” for the board’s executive director, but stay tuned. The hot speculation, naturally, is that Arizona is about to follow Colorado.
All of the hand-wringing assumes that losing the Buffs is a big blow. But beyond the hype of the Coach Prime experiment – can Deion Sanders really swap out nearly an entire football roster in one offseason and prosper? – there’s really not a lot to miss. Colorado football had one winning season and a 48-94 mark in 12 Pac-12 seasons, and the combined conference record for football, men’s and women’s basketball and women’s volleyball over that span was 316-461.
So no, this isn’t specifically about Colorado, even if it turns out that their departure opens the spigot. Really, if the Pac-12 ultimately goes out of business the first shovels of dirt were actually turned last July 30, when the Bay Area News Group’s Jon Wilner broke the news that USC and UCLA were leaving for the Big Ten come the fall of 2024.
We’ve said it all along, to the irritation of the Northwest schools’ fans, and events have borne it out: The Pac-12 was at its best, and its most relevant nationally, when the L.A. schools’ programs in football and men’s basketball were at their strongest.
Think back. In the summer of 2010 the then-Pac-10 was in a position to plunder rather than be plundered. Scott had been the commissioner for around seven months when he announced that the conference would consider expansion. The day that Colorado was welcomed to the fold, June 11, 2010, news broke that the conference might possibly add Texas, Texas Tech, Texas A&M, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State as well.
Imagine how that would have changed history. The Pac would have been the first 16-team super conference. The Big 12, which was also about to lose Nebraska to the Big Ten, might have been the first to fold its tent.
But that very same June 11 was also the day the NCAA came down with its penalty against USC, the bill coming due for the success of the Pete Carroll era: A two-year bowl ban, four years’ probation, a loss of 30 football scholarships over three years and 14 vacated victories because of violations involving Reggie Bush, plus sanctions against the men’s basketball program tied to violations of improper benefits rules involving O.J. Mayo.
Those penalties, so quaint now in the NIL era, set USC football back for the better part of a decade. You can make a strong case – and we have – that it also set the conference back significantly in terms of national profile.
Texas, as it turned out, scuttled the idea of a Pac-16. Five days after Colorado accepted that 2010 invitation, the Longhorns opted to stay in the Big 12 – partly (largely?) because that conference allowed Texas to set up its own TV network in conjunction with ESPN and keep all the revenue, as AP reported at the time.
For a couple of months after there were reports that a switch could still happen, but the Longhorn Network turned out to be the sticking point. In an ESPN interview that September Scott claimed he decided to close the door to that super-expansion, saying: “We could have expanded, but the deal didn’t make any sense at the end of the day for us, especially given the position that we are in. There is a very high bar. It’s hard to imagine very many scenarios for our conference to expand because the bar is so high.”
And he added this: “An opportunity was turned down that could have generated more money for the schools but potentially could have torn apart the fabric of the culture of the conference.”
Anyone else ever been confronted with something you said all those years ago that makes you wince now?
So, 13 years later, how the tables have turned. The Big 12 will have wound up losing Texas and Oklahoma anyway to the SEC after this school year, but it has rejuvenated itself and Commissioner Brett Yormark has aggressively and openly targeted the Pac-12.
If Arizona goes, does ASU stay or join its traditional rival? Could Utah bolt as well and make it a clean sweep of the Four Corners schools?
San Diego State is still awaiting an invitation but faces what is now a $34 million exit fee to leave the Mountain West and join in time for the 2024 football season. Would existing Pac-12 members be willing to help subsidize the Aztecs? And would SDSU be joining a conference about to become weaker than the one it would be leaving?
SMU, Kliavkoff’s other expansion target, and its wealthy boosters are said to still be interested and would bring the Dallas TV market. But there would be the optics of wooing a program the Big 12 was never particularly interested in adding anyway.
That old line from the 2006 Will Ferrell movie, Talladega Nights, about how if you’re not first, you’re last? Yeah, it was a punch line, but it also might be the Pac-12’s epitaph.
