PAC-10 EXPANSION: Larry Scott never stood a chance, as everyone but Texas takes it in the shorts
by Jeff Nusser on Jun 14, 2010 6:13 PM PDT
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PrintI don't really know what else to do except shake my head at this. Via ESPN:
The Longhorns network figures to generate between $3 million and $5 million, according to the Orangebloods.com report. Because the Big 12 has unequal revenue sharing, the deal will mean more money for Texas, Texas A&M and Oklahoma, who all would receive at least $20 million annually from the new deal. ...
The other seven schools in the Big 12 would make between $14 million and $17 million, doubling what they currently receive in TV revenue.
So, just to recap how this whole thing fell apart.
- Texas gets exactly what it wants;
- Texas A&M and Oklahoma get just enough security to keep them from a risky jump;
- The rest of the schools agree to sit at a disadvantage because they're just happy as hell not to be left out in the cold.
If it seemed amazing to you -- as it did to me -- that the Big 12 was able to recover from what seemed like imminent dissolution so quickly, let's just say it's appearing that Beebe and a TV network didn't do this on their own. According to Andy Katz, a number of influential people -- seemingly far more than the television networks Brian alluded to below -- stepped up to the plate when they realized the Pac-10 was about to completely and irrevocably remake the college football landscape:
"The Big 12 sticking wasn't a miracle,'' said the source. "There have been a number of people who were involved -- a number of seriously key people -- unrelated to the conference who will never be known to have helped get things on track.''
This really shouldn't surprise anyone. After all, a football playoff has made sense for about three decades, and look at how slowly that's moved. People in power do not like to give up that power, and the potential Pac-16 represented a seismic shift in power. It's far too simplistic to blame this on one school or one television network, because it's really, really obvious that it took more than that to make this thing fall apart. So don't do that.
Where does this leave us? The Pac-10 probably adds Utah and moves on in a stronger position for its next television contract. Make no mistake, this conference is stronger than it was two weeks ago, and WSU is better off for it. Don't lose sight of that.
Also don't think this is in any way over. If the Big 12 was saved -- as it appears that it was -- by network(s) overpaying to maintain status quo out of fear, all this does is stave off the inevitable. Once all the respective parties have repositioned themselves, this conversation is going to come up again in five or seven years because that television contract is going to be untenable. I also can guarantee you that while these schools are all happy to maintain the Big 12 for now, they're going to get tired really quick of watching Texas beat their brains in all while the Longhorns make between $5 and $10 million more a year than them.
In the end, it appears Larry Scott was in just a little over his head. If there truly were this many forces conspiring against him, he never really stood a chance. But you know what? I love the fact that he stood in there and took a swing. It's something Tom Hansen never would have done, and I can guarantee we haven't heard the last of this.
It just might be a few years before we hear about it again.
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If you read between the lines
A combination of the BCS and probably Fox stepped in. A realignment would have drastically changed the landscape of the BCS and the NCAA. It was too much for them to take lying down.
by Brian Floyd on Jun 14, 2010 6:24 PM PDT via mobile reply actions
If the BCS was behind this in any way,
they should pay. They have a thing for preventing people from seeing what they want.
by spencer peaty on Jun 15, 2010 10:26 AM PDT up reply actions
Skull & Bones secret society!
They even made a movie about it. Perhaps you’ve seen it?
by Kyle Rancourt on Jun 14, 2010 9:45 PM PDT up reply actions
Joshua Jackson and Paul Walker.
Easy on the eyes.
by Kyle Rancourt on Jun 14, 2010 11:59 PM PDT up reply actions
Positive and Negative
Positive: We should get a lot of money out of the TV deal and WSU knows how to do a lot with a little.
Negative: Possible North/South division alignment. Not good for WSU. Moos has already explained this.
WSU athletic director Bill Moos vocally opposed expansion when he took the position in February. He’s changed his mind. In fact, he doesn’t want the conference to stop with Colorado.
Asked if a much larger Pac-10 would be good for Washington State, Moos answered, “I believe it is. I’m convinced of that now.”
Moos said his worries were based on losing a presence in Southern California and the Bay Area, fertile recruiting grounds for WSU sports. But the more the conference expands, the greater the chance the Cougars would be aligned with the California schools.
“Now that we’ve gone to 11, anything we can do … that can keep us with east/west type of divisions, so we can keep that California presence,” is crucial, he said. “If we start going north/south, we probably would not see that.”
If the Pac-10 expands to 11 or 12 schools, there might be a push for combining the California and Arizona schools.
member of CougCenter since 9/2/08
If we go with a north/south division...
I believe we have just strengthened the California and Arizona schools.
WA, OR, UT & CO – 2009 population combined 18.1 million
CA & AZ – 2009 population combined 43.5 million
member of CougCenter since 9/2/08
Read on other sites
That some people are saying this is a blow and a bit embarrassing to the Pac-10 that people from outside of college sports are coming together to stop there expansion. It seems a lot of people did not want to see the power of college sports on the west coast.
I don't think it was that
It wasn’t just that they didn’t want power on the West coast. It’s that they didn’t want it to happen at the breakneck speed it was moving at. Change scares people.
Also
People who think this is embarrassing for the Pac-10 have not been paying attention to the Pac-10 for the past 25 years.
Please, no zipper divisions
I say we stay at 11 and play 10 conference games. 5 home and 5 away. The truth is that the only way to get any kind of clout is to start winning more. We either do that the SEC way (playing a bunch of patsies) or we start blowing people away in bowl games. I’d rather do the latter than have to sit through a game against SacState. Let’s play more conference games and just concentrate on playing better ball.
If you play 10 conference games
The two non-conference games will be against SacState and another patsy. Welcome to the world of college sports.
Well, some of our schools will still have a non-conference rivalry game.
USC will have ND. CU will have CSU and maybe even Nebraska once in a while. Stanford may still have a few games against the Irish. One crap game is better than the three some SEC teams routinely play.
You will never convince the schools that a round robin is beneficial in an 11 team league
It either goes unbalanced, or moves to 12 and 2 divisions. Playing a round robin will kill bowl chances and leave the conference in the dust.
I know mine is a fool's errand.
But I just want to be entertained. Playing you Cougs does that for me more than playing Directional Tech.
Zipper divisions
Play everyone in your division, play your rival, play two other crossovers. Simple.
I don't understand
are you mad at Texas now?
it seems like it was ok for the Pac 10 to try and poach Tex, OK, OK State etc in an attempt to line our pockets, but now that the Big 12 found a way to not get poached and give schools more money that Texas or whoever is somehow in the wrong now.
People are upset because many projections had TTech and OkSt earning more in the Pac16
But UT, aTm and OU forced them to accept less while lining their own pockets.
I thought you guys were made of harder stuff.
If PNW fans are so ready to go back to 8 games to pad our records, maybe we Cali folk should just circle the wagons and push for a southern division with the AZ schools. Many of us Californians pushed for a Pac16 precisely so that you guys would still get 2 trips to CA every year.
When you can convince the rest of the nation to play full round robins
Then you will have an argument.
What about a modified zipper if we go to 12 teams?
Say you can imagine three regions: PNW, CA, Other.
What about a zipper where you get a protected game against not only your rival, but also the region-mate you would have missed under a normal zipper? That would make for 9 games, would it not?
The other possible downfall of any kind of zipper is the ACC problem. Without a geographic split you lose the casual fans at the margin, because they lose track of who’s where in the standings.
Sorry for straying off topic, but thinking ahead to organizational issues was surely part of the Pac10 meetings that happened recently and I’d love to know what the contingency plan for the situation we’re in now is.
Texas knew how to leverage its influence, and on top of that they got a committee of white knights to help them if the Katz rumors are correct. I hope we are similarly well-armed for whatever comes next.
I hope this post is a bit less inflammatory. Didn’t intend to get labeled a troll.
It's not too far off topic
And it raises a lot of legitimate questions. I don’t know that there are any easy answers, but the four northwest schools will fight tooth and nail for their California influence. I would assume this has already been discussed, because there’s no way I can imagine that they didn’t have a contingency plan for if/when the Texas plan fell through.
Tell me why this is better for WSU.
I have heard everything the past few days and yes I know what is going on. Yes, we are now going to get a Pac10 TV network deal and we are all going to make millions, but what do you think that really means? Was this worth it to WSU? We will use that money to build facilities like Moos wants, because he understands how to build an athletic program. He wants to have the nicest facilities around to attract the student-athletes, which Oregon knows. So, we gain money to help Moos accomplish his goals. Everyone in our conference will be getting the same amount of money so they will also be making better facilities and more amenities in their stadiums. I understand posters views that we don’t have any money now, we are broke, that we have the lowest revenue in the Pac10, so this additional money really helps compared to other Pac10 schools. It’s all about the money. Do you think this additional money will help us catch up to the others? If one guys has $5 and the other has $9 and you give them both $5, now one has $10 and the other has $14, it didn’t even out. (If Moos helps the fund raising that is a whole different story) We most likely will end up in a division that leaves us out of the California market of 38 million people, but hey we gained more revenue. But at the cost of what? Now we get to fly to Denver and Salt Lake City, recruiting hot beds. With the Pac16, we were getting more money, playing in the CA market and getting some more time in Texas, a recruiting hot bed. Now we just have money and no CA market. O’ ya, Colorado is now going to get good recruits, because they are out of the Texas market and in the Salt Lake City and Oregon recruiting market, hopefully the Singlers have more younger brothers. Hopefully, these millions create more exposure for us. The one thing we have going for us is that we probably are the most crafty with the least amount of money, so hopefully that is the edge. Good think Wulff is developing a Florida recruiting pipeline.
member of CougCenter since 9/2/08
We've answered all these questions in other threads
From just a math standpoint, your comparison of WSU ($5 to $10) and School X ($9 to $14) points out that the move is more beneficial for us, because we’re getting an 100% increase in revenue while School X is only getting a 56% increase. Proportionately it helps us more.
We basically traded a yearly visit to LA and Bay Area schools for every-other-year visits and tons of money. For the types of recruits we typically get (diamond in the rough sort of players), I don’t think it will make that much of a difference. Maybe I’m off here. But why can’t we just schedule more non-con games with teams like San Diego State instead of OK State? It doesn’t look as good in strength of schedule but we’re years away from worrying about that.
by johnnycougar on Jun 15, 2010 9:44 AM PDT up reply actions
Well, I've moved through all of the stages of grief pretty quickly.
Being a Mariners fan conditioned me to hasten the coping process.
by Brian Floyd on Jun 14, 2010 9:05 PM PDT reply actions 2 recs
Ouch 9-3 loss.
Hopefully, PC can get the Seahawks on track. It would be nice to get a NW sport over .500.
I am in the recovery process. I am thinking about going to AA meetings for Pac16 withdrawal. I was taught in Drivers Ed you shouldn’t drive when emotional, well I should not be typing on here when emotional. Haha. I have dreaming for a week now about the Longhorn coming through the Martin Stadium tunnel.
member of CougCenter since 9/2/08
By the way, from the Katz article
The source said the people involved were business executives, conference commissioners, athletic directors, network executives with ties throughout college athletics, administrators at many levels throughout the NCAA membership and a “fair number of them without a dog in the hunt.”
Emphasis was mine. If you’re reading that and thinking a group of people with no vested interest stepped in to stop them, I have a bridge to sell you. Every single person that worked this deal had a dog in the hunt in one way or another. Conference commissioners didn’t want to scramble to catch up to a Pac-16 superconference. Athletic directors were about to get left in the cold. Network executives, duh. Business executives, hello BCS and NCAA sponsors that had money involved in this.
Every single person that played a role in either working toward a Pac-16, or slamming the brakes on realignment had a dog in the hunt.
/drops mic and walks off stage
I know
You’d expect Andy Katz to be a little more intelligent than that. But disparaging your sources generally doesn’t lead to those sources continuing to talk to you.
everyone has a dog in the hunt
it’s just that plenty of them are a couple steps down the line. Big East and ACC would have been significantly affected if everyone expanded fast, Utah schools (both UU and BYU) would have been left out, networks (ESPN and FSN, especially ESPON) would have lost market share and influence, and even politicians (who probably weighed in) had various interests.
Just because people weren’t either in the group of teams potentially moving or getting directly left behind from the Big 12 doesn’t mean they didn’t have a vested interest.
Even the AA guys had a vested interest in preventing super-conferences, because the 64 “haves” could then walk from the NCAA and leave those schools with jack.
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