What we’re hearing on Pac-12 expansion, SMU, the Big 12 and more

Editor’s note: The Big 12 and SEC confirmed Thursday night that Oklahoma and Texas will join the SEC in 2024 after an exit agreement was reached.

Written by Stewart Mandel, Nicole Auerbach, Max Olson and Chris Vannini.

Realignment is back in the news, thanks to continued discussions within the Big 12 about early exits for Oklahoma and Texas, and Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff’s visit to SMU on Wednesday.

Here is the latest from The Athletic’s reporters.

Pac-12 media rights

Last July, shortly after USC and UCLA’s defections, the Pac-12 opened negotiations for its next media rights contract, which would take effect with the 2024 football season. Seven months later, there’s still no deal — and people are getting antsy. With good reason.

Three people with knowledge of the discussions said commissioner George Kliavkoff is struggling to find partners willing to pay close to what the league is seeking. Two of those sources said Kliavkoff overpromised his members on how many bidders there would be and what dollar amount they could command — a target north of $40 million per school, according to one league athletic director. Today, it’s uncertain whether the Pac-12 will even be able to exceed the $31.6 million average the Big 12 reportedly landed in a six-year extension with ESPN and Fox it reached last fall.

“(We) don’t have a deal because it hasn’t been good,” said the AD.

Kliavkoff made some key miscalculations. At last summer’s Pac-12 media day, he suggested the Big Ten’s pending jackpot — which wound up being for $8.1 billion over seven years — would have a ripple effect on the Pac-12. But the Big Ten is a much more watched conference that garnered interest from nearly every major linear and digital media company. The Pac-12, by contrast, has found fewer bidders since going to the open market. Fox, for one, has expressed little interest now that the Los Angeles schools are part of its prized Big Ten package. And CBS (Big Ten and Mountain West) and NBC (Big Ten and Notre Dame) are set in college football for the next several years. However, one Pac-12 administrator did indicate a new player emerged shortly after the new year.

Kliavkoff also sounded certain last summer that his league would be next in line after the Big Ten because its deal was up a year earlier than the Big 12’s (which runs through 2025). But Big 12 counterpart Brett Yormark outflanked him, convincing existing partners ESPN and Fox to open up negotiations a year early. Whereas Kliavkoff drew out the process by taking his rights to market, Yormark reached an extension of the current contract within a couple of months. And the Big 12’s agreement may have provided its own ripple effect on negotiations by unofficially setting a ceiling. 

“It’s tough when your neighbor across the street sells his house for a low price,” said the Pac-12 administrator.

CLIP: ESPN and the Pac 12 are hundreds of million apart on a new deal, I'm told.

POD: https://t.co/TfOAEsCDiA pic.twitter.com/ZaLG0JaEG7

— Andrew Marchand (@AndrewMarchand) September 14, 2022

ESPN remains interested in the Pac-12, particularly in the league’s 10:30 p.m. ET games, but New York Post sports media writer Andrew Marchand reported last fall that the Pac-12 and ESPN were “hundreds of millions apart.” Which may explain why the Pac-12 is looking at possibly putting the majority of its games on a streaming platform. Sports Business Journal’s John Ourand predicted in December the league will “sell almost its entire media package to Amazon for a price that is slightly higher than what the Big 12 gets from ESPN and Fox.”

Which brings us back to expansion. Adding schools like San Diego State and SMU would not add significant value in a traditional TV deal, but a streaming service like Amazon or ESPN+ could be interested in volume. Inviting two more schools would add an extra 15 or so football games a year, which would raise the overall dollar amount (say, from $270 million a year to $300 million a year). Two sources believe the new schools would initially receive less than a full share — not unusual in these situations — which would up the existing schools’ slice of the pie.

While those sources still believe the media deal will be completed before any expansion becomes official, they also understand there could be pressure from media partners to swap the order of events so they know exactly what that inventory will be.

SMU and San Diego State in focus

SMU’s home basketball game on Wednesday night was supposed to serve as a secret pitch meeting, but it became a public demonstration. Multiple promotions and honors were scheduled heading into the matchup with Temple, including football players being told to attend the game. Several people in the athletic department weren’t sure why. The reason for the emphasis became clear when The Action Network first reported that Kliavkoff would visit SMU on Wednesday and On3 reported he would be at the game.

After a cold and rainy day in Dallas, Kliavkoff indeed attended. He tried to stay inconspicuous, wearing a black NBA Finals hat and a black quarter-zip. But The Athletic and the Dallas Morning News spotted him in a suite at the top of Moody Coliseum. He was flanked by two men who appeared to be Pac-12 deputy commissioner/COO Jamie Zaninovich and senior vice president of strategy Erik Hardenbergh. Throughout the game, the trio met with SMU president R. Gerald Turner, board of trustees chair and megadonor David B. Miller, athletic director Rick Hart and executive deputy AD/COO Kurt Pottkotter. Kliavkoff and Turner spoke for most of the second half, which saw SMU win on a free throw with three seconds left. The commissioner left the arena out of the view of media.

Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff has finally been spotted at the SMU basketball game, with other Pac-12 officials.

It took some searching with binoculars and a photog but we found him in a suite. Here is a bad photo. pic.twitter.com/Sm5AXIHt6j

— Chris Vannini (@ChrisVannini) February 9, 2023

SMU did not want this visit to become public, as conferences and schools prefer to keep realignment workings behind closed doors. Even after the news leaked, many SMU officials wouldn’t say a word on or off the record and wouldn’t confirm Kliavkoff’s appearance at the game. Many had found out he was coming only when the news broke.

But the suddenly public nature of the visit provided an opportunity. SMU’s student section was packed and scattered with signs with Pac-12 references. One fan, Jack Joyce, wrote “Pac” on the back of an SMU club baseball jersey with the No. 12. Dallas mayor Eric Johnson tweeted his support before tipoff.

After the win, Mustangs basketball coach Rob Lanier was asked whether he knew the Pac-12 commissioner was there and replied, “I read that, yep.”

SMU’s Pac-12 case is centered on its location in Dallas, which would bring the Pac-12 into Texas and the Central time zone, along with solid academics (it is a top-75 national university per U.S. News & World Report and is working to become a R1 research school) and a lot of money (a $2 billion endowment and many active big-money donors). It’s a private school, with an enrollment of more than 12,000, and is nonsectarian, having split from the United Methodist Church in 2019. The Pac-12 has avoided schools with religious ties in the past.

The school has had conversations with the Pac-12, Big 12 and ACC dating back to at least last summer, a school official told The Athletic last year. Turner had a call scheduled with University of Washington president Ana Mari Cauce on Aug. 1 of last year, according to an email obtained by The Athletic in a public records request. Kliavkoff’s visit on Wednesday was a big step toward a possible transformative moment for a school slowly working its way back to a major conference since the Southwest Conference dissolved in 1996.

San Diego State, which hosted Kliavkoff in December according to multiple reports, is confident about its position for Pac-12 expansion. The Aztecs’ case: a presence in Southern California, a new $310 million football stadium, an expanding campus and a combined football/men’s basketball record second only to Ohio State among FBS programs since 2010. The school put together a strategic operations plan to help prepare a possible move to the Pac-12, an idea SDSU took from Utah.

“We’re competitive in all of our sports, we invest in our programs, and we’re a rising star from an academic standpoint,” athletic director JD Wicker said last month, adding separately, “If an opportunity comes to anyone to elevate, no one is going to say no. We’ll continue to be the best San Diego State we can be, and see where that leads up. We’ll work with (commissioner Gloria Nevarez) and the Mountain West to make sure we’re being the best partner to everyone we can be.”

Leaders around college sports believe San Diego State is the No. 1 football option for the Pac-12 if it expands, but the longer the media deal negotiations drag out, the harder it is to predict what will happen.

Where the Big 12 stands

The Big 12 is now well-positioned to benefit from any Pac-12 chaos. But first, it needs to finalize its divorce from Oklahoma and Texas.

Conversations continue about an early exit for the two departing schools, which are contractually bound to the Big 12 through the 2024-25 academic year. Talks that would allow the Sooners and Longhorns to move on to the SEC ahead of the 2024 football season hit a snag last week, but they are not dead, two people with knowledge of the negotiations said.

Because of the number of parties — the Big 12 and its remaining schools, Oklahoma, Texas and television partners ESPN and Fox — the discussions are complex. While it remains possible the talks stall and Oklahoma and Texas are forced to stay through June 2025, neither side feels as if the discussions are close to a drop-dead deadline.

“Everybody wants to get it done,” one high-ranking official at a Big 12 school said. “It comes down to ESPN and Fox working their deal out. Fox doesn’t want to give up too much content for 2024.”

ESPN will become the exclusive home of the SEC starting in 2024-25, so adding the incoming members at that time would be ideal. But Fox must be made whole in some way if it’s going to agree to surrender its rights to 2024 games featuring the Big 12’s two biggest ratings-drivers. As one conference source close to the situation put it, “Fox doesn’t feel they need to give away something that they already have.”

Even if the Fox-ESPN dynamic is truly the missing piece in these negotiations, leaders at Oklahoma and Texas would also need to be satisfied with the other critical detail — the expensive exit penalties — needed for settling on an early split.

First-year Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark has a lot of bold ideas for the future of the Big 12 and plenty he is determined to accomplish, but he can’t move forward with many of those ambitions until this early exit gets resolved.

Yormark quickly delivered on a new media rights deal for the conference last October, agreeing to a six-year extension with ESPN and Fox through 2030-31 that will pay an average of $380 million per year. That maneuver to effectively leapfrog the Pac-12 when it had the advantage of being next to market is looking wiser by the day.

The Big 12 has been eyeing the four remaining Pac-12 South schools — Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah — since last summer but certainly also views Oregon and Washington as prized targets. Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren’s departure makes it tough for those two schools to assess whether they fit into that conference’s future plans. The longer the Pac-12’s hunt for an acceptable TV deal drags on and stirs doubts about the conference’s financial future, the easier it becomes for Yormark to make his pitch to those schools.

That’s not his only option. The Big 12 continues to talk with Gonzaga, one high-ranking source at the school confirmed. They described the Big 12’s approach as much more forward-thinking than the Pac-12. Yormark’s background is in basketball, and he sees serious potential in the idea of making the best men’s basketball conference even stronger. Gonzaga is determined to only make a move to either conference if it is for all sports.

When the Big 12 went through its last round of expansion in 2021, SMU was considered but wasn’t viewed as a serious contender. The concern was and has long been that SMU wouldn’t add value for the Big 12. But would the Pac-12 inviting SMU and entering the Dallas-Fort Worth market be detrimental for the Big 12? How will Yormark and his board assess that threat?

— The Athletic’s Andy Staples, Dana O’Neil and Christian Caple contributed to this report.

(Photo: Tom Pennington / Getty Images)