LAS VEGAS — The Pac-12 made a concerted effort at Friday’s football media day to spotlight its upcoming season. It opened the festivities at Zouk Nightclub (yes, a Vegas nightclub) with a flashy video montage highlighting its bevy of star quarterbacks like USC’s Caleb Williams, Washington’s Michael Penix Jr. and Oregon’s Bo Nix.
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Then commissioner George Kliavkoff took the stage and, not surprisingly, fielded zero questions about football and seven about the year-long drama surrounding the league’s media rights deal that will start in 2024, after USC and UCLA depart for the Big Ten. At one point he said, “We’re not announcing a deal on purpose today because I want the focus to be on football,” which led to an obvious follow-up from a reporter: “Does that mean the deal is done?”
“I think you’re reading too much into that,” replied Kliavkoff.
The commissioner’s address Friday marked his first on-the-record comments on the topic since December. At this point, after a year’s worth of presidents predicting a deal in “the next couple of weeks” or “by the end of the month,” there’s nothing he could have said that wouldn’t be met with rolled eyes.
But in conversations with several ADs and league officials over the course of the day Friday, folks seemed a lot more relaxed than they did this time a year ago.
“The 10 schools are together, and in recent weeks there’s been substantive progress (on the media rights deal),” said Oregon AD Rob Mullens. “Like everybody, I’m excited to get it across the finish line.” Echoing a report by The Athletic earlier this week, Mullens referenced “additional players at the table” that recently emerged.
Asked whether any concern remains about one or more of the Four Corners schools leaving for the Big 12, Mullens said: “I’m not losing any sleep over that.”
It’s been virtually impossible over the past year to glean any credible details about which media companies the Pac-12 is or isn’t talking to, much less for how much money they might get. Kliavkoff has kept his circle tight — a league official told me only one other person is in the room with him for the meetings. But Kliavkoff has done nothing to change the “Pac-12 is dying” narrative by hiding in his bunker for the past seven months.
Kliavkoff on schools possibly getting poached by the Big 12: "It's not a concern."
— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) July 21, 2023
“We could have spent all of last year getting into a he said/he said on every single rumor that’s been passed about our conference,” he said Friday. “We decided to take the high road.”
Until there’s an actual signed deal to announce with an actual dollar figure comparable to the Big 12’s $31.7 million average, there’s little evidence for anyone outside the league’s board rooms to believe Kliavkoff’s assertion that, “Getting the right deal has always been more important to our board and to the conference than getting the expeditious one.”
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No one has yet identified these mysterious new bidders that purportedly entered or reentered the picture sometime in the past month, but the league official outlined several factors why the market may have changed in the conference’s favor.
“Think about what the media and technology companies have been going through the last nine months — economic downturn, soft ad market, worse stock performance for most of those guys in decades, layoffs, writers and now actors strikes,” the league official said. “It’s been a brutal economic time. We’re just starting to come out of that.
“What we’ve seen is, every time we wait, we get more opportunities and better numbers.”
Perhaps we’ll find out more sometime before 2024 kickoff.
The other obvious topic du jour Friday was expansion. The Mountain West and San Diego State recently went through a back-and-forth of billable hours over whether the Aztecs did or did not officially withdraw from the conference come 2024. MWC commissioner Gloria Nevarez announced this week they’d reached an agreement by which SDSU will remain “a member in good standing” for now.
Asked whether the Pac-12 made a false promise to an expansion target, Kliavkoff, without referencing SDSU specifically, said, “We’ve never given anyone an indication that anything would be different than the sequence, which is, get our media rights deal done, grant of rights signed, then we’ll consider expansion.”
One reason SDSU has no clarity: Two league sources told The Athletic on Friday there’s not unanimity among the presidents to expand at all. It would take an 8-2 vote, and at least two schools — one of them assumed to be Oregon — don’t currently support it. The rationale being, they’d rather compete with fewer schools for the Pac-12’s berth in the expanded College Football Playoff, not to mention sharing CFP revenue with fewer mouths.
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If/when the league finalizes its TV deal, the order of events from there could move quickly. As previously reported, the 10 remaining schools have already agreed to the terms of their grant of rights language, which includes equal sharing of media revenue but performance-driven distribution of CFP money. It could theoretically be signed “within days.” And it’s not like they’d be starting from scratch on expansion. The presidents know well the most popular targets, believed to be SDSU and SMU, and won’t have much to debate.
In the meantime, the league would really, really like everyone to focus on its football season, which, to be fair, should be pretty darn exciting. Kliavkoff engendered some snickers. USC, Utah, Washington and Oregon are considered Playoff contenders, with UCLA and Oregon State pushing to be Top 25 squads as well. The Huskies, led by Penix, face Boise State and Michigan State in the first three weeks, two-time champ Utah hosts Florida and visits Baylor, Oregon goes to Texas Tech and Washington State hosts Wisconsin.
GO DEEPER
Deion Sanders couldn't help but be missed at Pac-12 Media Day
Also … there’s the tiny little story of Deion Sanders taking over Colorado. Coach Prime was not in Vegas due to a medical procedure, but the Buffs storyline looms large. Their season-opening trip to TCU may be the most intriguing game of the first full Saturday, and the next week’s home game against Nebraska has sold out. You’ll be able to catch those two on Fox, and many of the others mentioned above on ABC or ESPN.
Where to find the games in 2024 remains TBD. But maybe we’ll get the details “in the next couple of weeks.”
(Photo of George Kliavkoff: Kirby Lee / USA To
