Pac-12 commissioner interested in possible Big 12 partnership before college football expansion feud

Before the Pac-12 and Big 12 engaged in a public feud regarding the most recent round of college football expansion — and whether it might include one conference poaching teams from the other — Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff was intrigued by the possibility of partnering with the Big 12, according to an email obtained via public records request by The Athletic. Here’s what you need to know.

• The June 30 decision by USC and UCLA to leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten in 2024 sent the Pac-12 scrambling to secure its future as a conference.
• The Big 12 is losing Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC as early as 2024.
• A partnership between the Pac-12 and Big 12 didn’t materialize, and the public tenor between the two conference commissioners grew sour in late July.

Backstory

A July 18 report by ESPN indicated that the leagues had decided against partnering, a decision framed as the Big 12 informing the Pac-12 that it wasn’t interested. Kliavkoff offered a different version of those events later that month, telling The Athletic at Pac-12 media day: “The Big 12 asked whether we would be interested in merging, and we explained to them the financial reasons and the contractual reasons related to existing media deals that would make it impossible for us to merge with them.”

He seemed more open-minded in an email sent July 7 — one week after the USC-UCLA news broke — to Ana Mari Cauce, president of the University of Washington and the new chair of the Pac-12’s executive committee, and Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, another executive committee member. In that email, Kliavkoff outlined his messaging strategy for a Zoom meeting scheduled for the following day with Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark, Texas Tech president and Big 12 board of directors chair Lawrence Schovanec and Kevin Sweeney, the Big 12’s longtime outside general counsel.

“We are open to discussing a strategic relationship with the Big12 [sic] that could help both Conferences and we have no preconceived notions about what would be possible or not; we think it is worth exploring,” Kliavkoff wrote to the two Pac-12 presidents.

Kliavkoff mentioned that he had informed Yormark that he also had spoken with the ACC, “and the ACC commissioner knows that we are talking to the Big12.”

It was important to communicate to the Big 12 that transparency and good faith were paramount, Kliavkoff wrote.

“We want to work in good faith to see if there is value we can create together, but the certainty of each of our current memberships is essential to the potential value of any prospective collaboration,” he wrote. “The Pac-12 has not called or contacted a single president or AD or any other affiliated person with any Big12 school in the last week and we have not returned any such calls, recognizing the potential larger value to our members of a prospective collaboration with [the] Big12 that increases our competitiveness on the national landscape.”

Reports began circulating that the Big 12 was in talks with several Pac-12 schools to discuss expansion options. Six days after Kliavkoff’s email, Yormark declared the Big 12 “open for business” regarding expansion, a remark Kliavkoff clearly interpreted as directed at the Pac-12. At his conference’s media day later that month, Kliavkoff retorted that “with respect to the Big 12 being open for business, I appreciate that. We haven’t decided if we’re going shopping there yet or not.”

He vented about “grenades that have been lobbed in from every corner of the Big 12, trying to destabilize our remaining conference,” and touted what he believes to be the Pac-12’s superior media rights value in declaring that “no Pac-12 school is going to the Big 12.” Two Pac-12 athletic directors echoed that belief.

Kliavkoff was at least intrigued by the Big 12’s media rights timeline, though, and included it as a talking point with Cauce and Tessier-Lavigne, writing: “There may be a particularly interesting opportunity since both of our media rights (and especially our football media rights) come up in the next 3 years and this will be the last high level college rights available for a long time.”

Where do things stand now?