The PAC-12 Is Now The PAC-4

I said there were two calamitous events in the sports world over the weekend and yesterday was devoted to the early departure from the World Cup by the USWNT.  Today, let me chew on the implosion of the PAC-12 to its current state as the PAC-4.  With all the so-called “4-Corner Schools” now aligned with the Big-12 and with Washington and Oregon going to the Big-10 along with USC and UCLA, the entity that Bill Walton loves to call the “Conference of Champions” is reduced to:

1. Cal
2. Oregon State
3. Stanford
4. Washington State.

That’s it; that’s the list.  And consider that Washington and Oregon fled this sinking ship because they took only a partial share of the revenue stream(s) from the Big-10 for several years because half of something is better than all of nothing.  What happened over the weekend is that the Power 5 has become the Core Four.

• [Aside: This has happened before to college football.  About 10 years ago there were six major college football conferences but then the Big-East evaporated leaving the Power 5 and now the PAC-12 has gone the way of all flesh …]

And don’t those folks at San Diego State who “resigned from the Mountain West Conference” and were supposed to join the PAC-12 just before the implosion look smart for running home to the Mountain West.  Let me start with the bottom line here which is TV money.  The PAC-12 has been trying to get a new media rights deal to tack onto the one they now have through the end of 2024, and they cannot get one that is even marginally interesting.  That fact tells you a lot about PAC-12 football and basketball – the two sports that generate the revenues that allow all the other sports to exist.

• Even before the start of the demise of the PAC-12, it was an uninviting product.

With all the sports-focused networks out there along with the mainstream networks and new streaming services that appear to generate spontaneously every two weeks, there is ample room for “content” to find a home or multiple homes.  Networks are paying real money for the broadcast rights to things like pickleball and cornhole and professional bull riding and professional fishing.  But they would not pay enough to keep the PAC-12 from imploding …

The fundamental underpinning of the PAC-12’s demise demonstrates that we can no longer pretend that college football is “amateur football”.  It is not; it may not be the NFL or even the XFL/USFL, but it is not “amateur” in any sense of that word.

There was an interesting element of hypocrisy embedded in this story as the vultures were circling above the PAC-12 waiting for it to succumb.  SEC Commissioner, Greg Sankey, sought to stay above the fray and stated that he was sorry to see the damage wrought upon the PAC-12 and called for cooler heads to prevail.  That would be a statesmanlike position absent a smidgen of reality:

• It was Sankey and his SEC that kicked the snowball over the cliff here when they poached Texas and Oklahoma from the Big-12.

There are plenty of losers in this collapse.  Oregon State and Washington State are huge losers; both will have to hope to beg their way into the Mountain West Conference even if it means a swift kick to their wallets.  The Rose Bowl becomes a huge loser so long as long as its contract to have the Big-10 champ play the PAC-X champ holds.  Ohio State/Oregon State anyone?  Cal/Wisconsin?

Athletes on PAC-12 teams in the “non-revenue sports” are going to lose out too.  The women’s softball team and/or the men’s tennis team – – just as examples – – are going to be playing a bunch of “away games” at far-flung venues.  The PAC-12 used to cover two time zones; now athletes in Washington’s non-revenue sports will cover all four US time zones.  Football teams – and maybe a few men’s basketball teams – fly charter to away games; softball and tennis teams fly commercial.  How about those connecting lights from State College, PA to Eugene, OR?  Sounds like fun to me.

One more loser for the moment is the agreed upon formula for putting teams in the expanded CFP.  Current rules call for the champions of the top six conference champions to get automatic bids to the CFP; well, is that going to work if one of the top six is the PAC-4?  No, it will not work and so it will need to be changed causing even more agita in the college football world.

Moreover, please do not think this is the end of the line for college football realignment/reshuffling/reorganization because it is not.  As school athletic programs become addicted to huge revenues generated by college football, there will be a natural tendency to want to continue to grow those revenues.  At some point – – probably not imminent but inevitable somewhere down the road – – the networks that pay for those expensive media rights will turn to the Big-10 people and say something like:

• We would offer lots more money for rights to more games like Michigan/Ohio State or Penn State/USC, but we have too many Purdue/Illinois and Rutgers/Maryland games in the package for us to raise our bids above this number.
• Imagine the same topic coming up in SEC media rights negotiations and in Big-12 negotiations.
• Then imagine the media rights deal that would go to the “Big Guys” from all three “Big Conferences” if all those “Big Guys” might come together to for the “Biggest Conference of All”.

Unless you can show that you predicted all the current machinations about 10 years ago, please do not say that my scenario is “impossible” or “unthinkable”.  I may not be alive to see this sort of upheaval come to pass, but it would not surprise me at all.

There is a rumbling in the college football world that says all this turmoil may not be at an end.  The ACC has been quiet through all this; recall that it was the ACC that picked apart the Big East in the last reshuffling of the college football landscape; this time the conference has done nothing.  But there are plenty of reports that Florida State is unhappy that there has been insufficient escalation of ACC media rights and other reports that Miami wants to play Florida regularly and to monetize that “special game”.  I have no idea if anything will come out of those rumblings down south in the ACC, but I never thought Arizona State and West Virginia would be conference rivals either.

As strange as all these college football doings are, let me assure everyone that I am on record with a reinvention of college football that is far more radical than is evidenced by the status quo.  In January 2017, I wrote here about a new world for college football.  Some of the features of my reinvention are:

• A “Big Boys” Category consisting of 8 divisions of 8 teams aligned geographically.
• A “Little Boys” Category consisting of 8 divisions of 8 teams aligned geographically.
• Relegation and promotion annually between the two categories.

If you find those sorts of ideas – – and they are not the only changes I propose – – interesting, here is the link to my rant from January 19, 2017.  It is never going to happen, but it is not nearly as outrageous to consider in the current environment as it was back then.

Finally, since it is probably too early to know if all these changes are for the good and too early to know who the “good guys” are as opposed to the “bad guys”, let me close with these words from the French poet, Anatole France:

“It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law.  Nature has no principles.  She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected.  Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………