The Pac-12 won’t have a media rights deal to unveil at Pac-12 media day on July 21. The conference fell short of its best-case scenario. Yet, if you read the reports from ESPN and Jon Wilner and other outlets which have been following this ongoing story, you will note that Pac-12 sources are “super confident” of the deal they claim they are about to reach.
Wilner, at The Wilner Hotline, quoted a Pac-12 source as saying, “The patience the presidents have shown is about to pay off. The longer we wait, the more bidders there are and the better the outcome.”
Another source told Wilner that the Pac-12 presidents were willing to “wait it out for people to come back to the (negotiating) table. They locked arms and fought through the last nine-to-12 months.”
Pac-12 sources are speaking like people who have already won a victory. Either everything is being lined up properly, or this is the most disingenuous, prolonged set of shameless smokescreens in the history of conference media rights negotiations.
The question the Pac-12 will ultimately have to answer is this: What is giving the Pac-12 such confidence that it will arrive at a deal with a price point and overall terms which will make its member schools happy, even though San Diego State — remaining in the Mountain West — won’t be part of the first year (at minimum) of this media rights deal in 2024?
Industry insiders have generally believed the Pac-12 would need added inventory — meaning a 12-member conference with over a dozen more football games per season — to reach a price point which would be sufficiently competitive with the Big 12. Unless a last-minute flip-flop is in the works with San Diego State — which would bring the Aztecs to the Pac-12 by July of 2024 and have them on board for the 2024 college football season — what has the Pac-12 done behind the scenes to inspire such total confidence that its deal will be successful?
We can’t wait to see how this question is answered.
Wilner projects that the Pac-12 will take four to six more weeks to ultimately disclose details of its media rights package, meaning the reveal will occur before the end of August.
The answers aren’t here yet, but it might not be that much longer before we learn the deeper details of this seemingly neverending story.
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