Whatever else you might think about Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff, this much can be acknowledged: He had a very big mess to clean up in the Pac-12, a mess so big it wasn’t going to be taken care of in one year on the job.
Kliavkoff is approaching the two-year anniversary (July 1) of his arrival in Pac-12 offices. USC and UCLA left for the Big Ten the day before the first anniversary of his tenure. The gears were in motion. The process which carried the Trojans out of the Pac-12 had already begun to take flight before Kliavkoff could really do everything in his power to keep USC in the fold. Pac-12 instability is not his fault; it’s the fault of his predecessor, Larry Scott.
That’s why new details on Pac-12 finances, collected and analyzed by Jon Wilner of the Wilner Hotline, are so noteworthy. We start with an item on Larry Scott himself: