Question: Is the Pac-12 going to collapse, blow apart, disintegrate, transform into a backwater league, do the hokey pokey and turn itself around what with USC, UCLA jumping ship and Colorado taking its right and left feet, its right and left arms, out, along with most of its other body parts, leaving what’s left of the conference to shake itself all about?
Answer: Not if there’s a football god in heaven.
It’s no big secret as to the reason USC and UCLA are bolting. It’s the same reason that rules the world, far beyond sports, and it starts with an m and ends in a y, courtesy of the TV networks and the Big Ten.
Colorado appears motivated by the same m, the same y, compliments of the Big 12.
The Buffs have waited on the Pac-12 to get its media rights deal done … waited and waited and waited. And it, apparently, wanted to wait no more, even as Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff has said not only that the conference will get that deal put in place, but diminished the doomsday scenario surrounding the league, indicating that the Pac-12 and all of college football has “bigger fish to fry.”
It’s hard to imagine, at least for the Pac-12, what those bigger fish might be. Is Kliavkoff doing his best Captain Ahab, looking for Moby Dick while the storm rages and the Pequod-12 sinks? Is he putting his whalebone prosthetic in, taking it out, and shaking it all about?
Enough of the metaphors, mixed as they might be.
The Pac-12′s problems, stemming back to the arrogant and presumptuous and inept leadership of former commissioner Larry Scott, remain difficult. Its media deal must get done. And that deal needn’t be the equal of the Big 12′s $31.7 million per year per school. If it were the same, it might soothe the egos of jumpy school administrators in the Pac-12 and be more symbolic than anything, that the whole getup isn’t in utter decline. If it’s within shouting distance, that should be good enough to hold the league together — for the time being.
While the loss of SC and UCLA undeniably has weakened the Pac-12, made it less valuable, what exactly does the departure of Colorado do? It doesn’t help, but how much does it hurt? It loses the Denver market, but competitively speaking, what’s the damage done? Is that also more symbolic than literal?
Some observers fear that other Pac-12 schools will run through the opening the Buffs seem to be creating. That certainly could happen if Kliavkoff’s promised deal falls drop-dead short.
And while a number of school leaders — including Utah athletic director Mark Harlan — say what remains of the league is solid, committed, determined to hang together, nobody’s forgetting what Colorado AD Rick George told CBS’s Dennis Dodd, namely … “We are proud members of the Pac-12. In a perfect world, we’d love to be in the Pac-12, but we also have to do what is right for Colorado at the end of the day.”
Nothing, including the world, is perfect.
George said what he said just two months ago.
I’m no football prophet. At this point, nobody really knows how all of this will shake out — on account of the variables centered on the very thing that schools care the most about — uh-huh, money. But look at what remains in the Pac-12, with or without the Buffs. You know the obvious, the familiar names: Utah, Washington, Oregon, Stanford, Cal, Arizona, Arizona State, Oregon State, Washington State.
If two or three more of those universities were to exit the building, the Pac would be toast. But if they really do stay together, if some kind of media rights deal can be finalized, the league would remain valuable enough to forge ahead, to fend off the sharks that swim, and look forward to a better day. Think about it. We’re not talking a bunch of Southwest Presbyterian Techs and Dinwoody States here, laughable little outfits situated in the far reaches of Egypt.
Moreover, the western regions of the country need their college football. Folks in the Pac-8, Pac-10, Pac-12 have always been a bit paranoid that the powers that be in the East held too much bias and sway over everything that happened in the college game. But to believe these worthy schools and programs in the West can only survive by attaching themselves to associations in faraway time zones, in the dusty plains and urban centers of the midwest, would be not just an unbalanced travesty, but a bad joke.
Despite their past arrogance, their self-attached Conference of Champions moniker, Pac-12 schools deserve better and, I hope, will eventually get better, in every connotation of that word play.
Root for it.
It’s what’s best not only for what’s left of a temporarily lurching league out yonder somewheres, but for a college football country the borders of which shouldn’t end in Texas and Illinois, the control of which shouldn’t be headquartered in and directed from Irving and Rosemont.
