Tag: Pac-12 death

Oregon State’s Jonathan Smith hired by Michigan State — crushing blow for Beavers and a dying Pac-12

#B1G news, and another gut punch for Oregon State.

What a gut punch for Oregon State University. As though the death of the Pac-12 Conference wasn’t enough, the Beavers have now lost their head coach, a development likely connected to the Pac-12’s demise. Worse than that, however, is the fact that Oregon State lost its coach to the Big Ten. Oregon State isn’t going to the Big Ten, but Jonathan Smith is. Smith was announced as Michigan State’s new head coach late Saturday morning.

As an interesting plot twist, Michigan State made the announcement during the big football game played by two of its main rivals, Michigan and Ohio State.

Spartans Wire has more on the story:

“Smith, the 2022 Pac-12 Coach of the Year, quickly helped turnaround the Oregon State program and will now be tasked with doing the same in East Lansing.

“The news was reported by Nick Daschel of The Oregonian along with 247Sports and then confirmed by the Michigan State football Twitter/X account.”

You can imagine how people across the country reacted to this huge story.

Let’s get a sampling of that reaction:

Oregon State and Washington State win court ruling, setting up more Pac-12 chaos

This is absolutely wild, but it’s par for the course in the Pac-12. The death of a conference could not be more dramatic.

The 2-Pac just won. The Pac-10 just lost. The Pac-12’s death — and how that will be resolved — continues to be one of the strangest dramas we have ever seen in college sports.

Jon Wilner of the Wilner Hotline offered this basic summary of what happened and what it means:

“After a two-and-a-half-hour hearing, Whitman County (Wash.) Superior Court Judge Gary Libey granted the schools’ request for a preliminary injunction that confirms they are the only remaining voting members of the shattered conference.

“The Pac-12 ‘will be governed by the two universities that have not submitted their notices of intent to withdraw,’ Libey said.

“However, Libey stayed his ruling until the end of the week as the defendant, Washington (acting on behalf of all 10 departing members), seeks an appeal from the Washington Supreme Court in Olympia.

“But the ruling Tuesday evening begins to clear the way for WSU and OSU to control more than $400 million in revenue for the current fiscal year and whatever long-term assets the conference maintains following the departure of 10 schools next summer.”

Oregon State and Washington State are in position to potentially recover a lot of lost revenue, but the court battles are far from over.

Reactions came in fast and furious, as you will see below:

New reporting shows Pac-12 died because CEO Group didn’t grasp the situation

New reporting from John Canzano details how the Pac-12’s death was less the cause of one person and more due to group paralysis.

If you follow the Pac-12 on a regular basis, and if you have come here to Trojans Wire for realignment content, you probably know how the conference collapsed. The Pac-12 had a media rights offer from ESPN in 2022 which would have paid out $30 million per school to the 10 schools left after USC and UCLA bolted for the Big Ten.

We have collected various other details from reportage by John Canzano and Jon Wilner, plus statements from former television executives, which explain how the Pac-12 died.

One of the juicy details involved was that one Pac-12 president reportedly pushed for a higher dollar figure for the media rights deal. Given how much Arizona State truly didn’t want to leave the Pac-12, we speculated that the “unknown president” might have been in Tempe.

That did not turn out to be the case.

What is also emerging, however, is that one school president didn’t torpedo the ESPN deal last year. It was a collective effort in which the Pac-12 CEO Group couldn’t reach agreement and put up a united front.

Fresh reporting has unearthed the fuller picture of how the Pac-12 couldn’t get its act together in a moment of crisis:

(h/t John Canzano — subscription required)

We went behind the paywall for Canzano’s article and will share some of his important findings below:

Pac-12 dominated in Week 1, but fans aren’t happy due to league’s death

It’s so #Pac12: The league looks as great as it has in a long time, but no one is happy because the Pac won’t exist in 2024.

You really can’t make this stuff up, can you? The Pac-12 Conference, on its deathbed, its membership scattered and peeled away one by one to other Power Five conferences, looks great on the football field in 2023. Washington scored 56, USC 66, Oregon 81. Colorado won as a 20-point underdog at TCU, the school which made the national championship game this past January.

Washington State won in a road blowout at Colorado State. Cal won in a big blowout at North Texas. Stanford hammered Hawaii on Friday. UCLA handled its business against Coastal Carolina. Utah beat Florida by 13 points on Thursday in a game which wasn’t that close. Arizona smashed Northern Arizona. Arizona State didn’t look great, but it did win its opener.

The Pac-12 is unbeaten heading into Oregon State’s Sunday game versus San Jose State. The league hasn’t lost a game yet. It should be a time to celebrate how much the conference has improved, and how good the conference could become this year. It’s probably the second-best conference in college football behind the SEC. People should be happy.

They’re not. It’s for a simple reason: The conference is dying.

People can’t believe this is happening, as you can see below:

Twitter reaction to Stanford, Cal and SMU joining the ACC

Stanford and Cal will play conference games vs Florida State, Miami, Clemson, Boston College, and Syracuse. Really smart, right?

Stanford and Cal-Berkeley will soon be in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Few sentences in the English language sound more absurd or ridiculous. Yet, that will be the new reality of college sports before too long.

The Trees of Palo Alto and the Bears of Berkeley will be part of a conference which includes the cities of Coral Gables, Florida; Tallahassee, Florida; Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts; Syracuse, New York; Pittsburgh; Clemson, South Carolina; Blacksburg, Virginia; Charlottesville, Virginia; and four locales in the state of North Carolina.

Normal, rational, logical stuff, right? None of this is logical, but it was the obvious play for Stanford if we assume the Big Ten Conference simply wasn’t interested in adding the Cardinal. The rationale from the ACC side is not as readily obvious for most college sports fans, but the conference will get some more television money from ESPN with these additions. Florida State fans would respond by saying the added money is nowhere near enough for the Seminoles to be satisfied with their current position in the ACC.

Welcome to the absurdity of college sports realignment. Reaction on social media, as you can imagine, was all over the map, which is a great way of describing Stanford and Cal going to the ACC:

Former Fox Sports executive explains how Pac-12 miscalculated and killed itself

The executive noted that the $ ESPN and Fox are paying to relocated #Pac12 schools is more than the $30M per school the Pac turned down in 2022.

Bob Thompson is a former Fox Sports television executive. He is a voice of experience in television negotiations, particularly in college sports media rights battles such as the recent Pac-12 theater of the absurd that wound up killing the conference.

When the Pac-12 rejected ESPN’s 2022 deal, it ignored Thompson’s specific advise and expertise. Thompson had estimated the value of a Pac-12 package without USC and UCLA at $30 million per school per year. That dollar figure is what the Pac-12 rejected last year in the hope of a $50 million moonshot. If the Pac-12 had taken ESPN’s deal, it would be alive and stable today.

Thompson cited that $30 million per school figure in an illuminating set of social media posts. Let’s share that thread and offer a few other notes from fans in ACC markets who are thinking about whether inviting Stanford and Cal is a good idea:

Pac-12, George Kliavkoff allowed themselves to be strong-armed by a professor

An @LATimesSports report details how one school president and professor derailed the deal which would have saved the #Pac12.

If you have lived long enough, you have probably met at least one person who has crazy, outside-the-box ideas. Whether it’s an inventor with all sorts of concepts for new products, or a consultant who insists on being unconventional at every turn, or an ideological true believer with novel theories of politics, there’s at least one person we come across who is out in left field and has a drastically different take on a lot of topics.

If that person is a close friend or relative, we will listen to that person so as to not alienate him or her, but there’s a huge difference between listening and — on the other hand — taking that kind of person’s ideas seriously.

Guess what? The Pac-12 took that person’s ideas seriously … and the conference is on its deathbed as a result.

Brady McCollough of the Los Angeles Times came out with a well-reported, highly-sourced examination of the collapse of the Pac-12 on Wednesday. There are several stories we need to share with you from that report, but the biggest one is that the Pac-12 listened to a wacky fringe professor with a crazy idea. George Kliavkoff, instead of asserting himself as a leader who told the Pac-12 CEO Group what had to be done in a time of crisis, allowed one university president and professor to derail the deal which would have saved the conference.

Plenty of people within the Pac-12 Conference have their suspicions about the identity of the professor (and school) involved, but it will be interesting to see if today’s inclinations and thoughts are confirmed — or refuted — in subsequent days and weeks.

You can’t make this stuff up. Let’s dive into the details:

Time to say goodbye: Remembering the Pac-12’s most important moments

We didn’t want to do this, but we have to: It’s time to say goodbye to the #Pac12 — right, Andrea Bocelli?

Maybe the Pac-4 schools will merge with the Mountain West and very technically preserve the Pac-12. Yet, we all know the Pac-12 as we have lived through it — as we have experienced it — is dead.

No more Arizona-UCLA basketball as a conference game with championship stakes. Maybe the two schools will play nonconference games, but it won’t feel the same.

No more Oregon-Stanford football games as a conference game with the Ducks trying to avoid a crucial loss in the Pac-12 standings.

No more Washington road trips to Tempe, trying to solve the mystery of Arizona State, a place where the Huskies have not won a football game since 2001. These and other Pac-12 (formerly Pac-10) games were part of our lives here in the West, and next year, they’ll be gone. Schools will surely schedule nonconference games, but that won’t feel remotely the same.

It’s time for a Pac-12 goodbye tour — not just for us at USC (which we were planning for), but for at least eight schools. If Stanford and Cal go to the ACC, and Oregon State and Washington State get absorbed into the Big 12, that’s it for everyone (officially).

As Andrea Bocelli has said — and sung — “time to say goodbye.” We didn’t want this, but it’s what we have to do. It is indeed time for the Pac-12 farewell tour, which begins now and continues throughout the college football and college basketball seasons here at Trojans Wire.

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New USC YouTube show identifies key reasons the Pac-12 died

.@LBCTrojan has a new #USC show at the @VoiceOfCFB. He notes a key moment in March of 2017 which led to the #Pac12’s death.

Rick Anaya is the co-host with Tim Prangley of Trojan Conquest Live, one of multiple shows on the USC channel at The Voice of College Football. You can watch Rick and Tim on Sundays and can soon catch them on the USC football postgame show, following each Trojan football game this season. The first USC postgame show will be right after the San Jose State game on August 26.

Rick Anaya wanted to create his own standalone USC show in addition to Trojan Conquest Live. He unveiled his new YouTube show last week, called “Trojans Talk On Tap.”

In this premier episode, Rick traces the timeline of events which led to the death of the Pac-12 as we know it. You’re aware of a lot of these events, so we’re not going to lay out the full list of important moments. We will, however, mention one event Rick brought up. It’s an overlooked moment which caused the Pac-12’s eventual destruction.

Rick very astutely pointed out the three-year contract extension the Pac-12 CEO Group gave to Larry Scott in March of 2017. Scott had utterly whiffed on getting the Pac-12 Network a DirecTV deal and other deals on visible distribution platforms. His Pac-12 Network dream had essentially died. The plan, the vision, for maximizing revenue through Pac-12 Network had failed.

There was no good reason to give Scott that three-year extension. One year later, in 2018, the Pac-12 (led by Scott) rejected ESPN’s offer to take over distribution of the Pac-12 Network. Those two events are linked, and they are central to the death of the Pac-12. Rick delivered a very smart, thoughtful overview of how the Pac-12 arrived at this disastrous state of affairs.

Be on the lookout for the next episode of “Trojans Talk On Tap” with Rick Anaya, and be sure to subscribe to, like, and share the USC YouTube channel at The Voice of College Football.

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Pac-12 presidents, George Kliavkoff ignored widely available industry expertise

In July of 2022, after USC left for the #B1G, a consultant estimated a #Pac12 media deal could get $30M per school. He was ignored.

You know by now that the Pac-12 presidents rejected a 2022 offer by ESPN which, if accepted, would have paid out $30 million per school and likely saved the conference. That’s really bad. It’s yet another embarrassment for a conference which is on its last legs and has been reduced to just four schools.

Yet, it gets worse. It always gets worse in the Pac-12. This is how the conference operates. There are always a few more details which make a bad situation even more embarrassing than we all appreciated 24 or 48 hours earlier.

The latest damning details come from Pac-12 insider John Canzano. In his report about longtime sports executive and administrator Oliver Luck being brought in as a consultant to the remaining Pac-4 schools, Canzano also included some notes on a media industry expert the Pac-12 presidents very clearly ignored over the past 13 months.

We have details on that and a lot more below. It’s going to be even more of a headache, but you have to read these details to get an even fuller picture of how badly the Pac-12 presidents messed up: