Smoke your cigars and enjoy the band while you can....

[MadCat]

https://247sports.com/Article/san-diego-state-attempt-to-build-power-five-conference-fails-per-report-213995323/
San Diego State jumps on, slaps the cigars away and barges through the band to try steering the PAC ship themselves.

[Katpappy]

https://247sports.com/Article/san-diego-state-attempt-to-build-power-five-conference-fails-per-report-213995323/
San Diego State jumps on, slaps the cigars away and barges through the band to try steering the PAC ship themselves.

Dennis Dodd reported this around noon today, but I do like your summary. 

[steve dave]

https://twitter.com/lucy_rohden/status/1689028603097264129


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[BostonPancake]

Lololol if true.

1) Big 12 doesn't want wsu b/c big 12 presidents don't like schulz.
2) He's been on and is still on a cruise.

33:12 - https://www.iheart.com/podcast/59-puck-27459121/episode/8-7-h3-seahawks-lineman-liam-ryan-120595312/

Is there an Olive Garden on that cruise ship?

[michigancat]

https://twitter.com/lucy_rohden/status/1689028603097264129


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So good

[Trim]

Lololol if true.

1) Big 12 doesn't want wsu b/c big 12 presidents don't like schulz.
2) He's been on and is still on a cruise.

33:12 - https://www.iheart.com/podcast/59-puck-27459121/episode/8-7-h3-seahawks-lineman-liam-ryan-120595312/

Is there an Olive Garden on that cruise ship?

https://www.olivegarden.com/locations/ak/anchorage/tikatnu-commons/4412

[cfbandyman]

https://247sports.com/Article/san-diego-state-attempt-to-build-power-five-conference-fails-per-report-213995323/
San Diego State jumps on, slaps the cigars away and barges through the band to try steering the PAC ship themselves.

Dennis Dodd reported this around noon today, but I do like your summary. 

Like, I don't want San Diego State, and we don't need San Diego State, but you need someone like San Diego State to remember you're alive goddamn it.

[Katpappy]

Thoughts about how desperate the PAC was in those final days:
.https://twitter.com/FansGoElsewhere/status/1686411701275807744?s=20

[PurpleOil]

That was beautiful

[KST8FAN]

He Inherited ‘Multiple Dumpster Fires’ at the Pac-12. Then It Went Up in Smoke. - The Wall Street Journal.
He Inherited ‘Multiple Dumpster Fires’ at the Pac-12. Then It Went Up in Smoke. https://www.wsj.com/articles/pac-12-collapse-commissioner-george-kliavkoff-c3df1d9f


Tom

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[Pete]

Post the article, Tom!

COLLEGE FOOTBALL
He Inherited ‘Multiple Dumpster Fires’ at the Pac-12. Then It Went Up in Smoke.
George Kliavkoff’s experience in streaming media was supposed to lead the Pac-12 into the future. Instead he is overseeing the likely demise of a storied college conference.
Two summers ago, George Kliavkoff took on one of the least desirable and most difficult executive jobs in college sports: resuscitating the rapidly fading Pac-12 Conference. 
Revenue in the so-called “Conference of Champions” lagged well behind the two giants that now dominate college sports, the Big Ten and Southeastern Conferences. The Pac-12 hadn’t produced a football or men’s basketball champion since 2004. It was burdened by its once-innovative television network, which never reached its potential.
Kliavkoff won the job as Pac-12 commissioner with a résumé full of digital media jobs—at places like Major League Baseball and NBCUniversal—that seemed to prepare him for finding a lucrative path into a future that would be dominated by streaming, rather than cable and broadcast deals. 
But almost immediately after Kliavkoff took over, he realized that he was taking over “not just a dumpster fire, but multiple dumpster fires,” according to a person familiar with his thinking. 
Kliavkoff was stymied by the Pac-12’s own member schools, who shut down possible expansion in the summer of 2021. He was stiff-armed by television networks that dragged their feet in negotiations. He miscalculated the market for a new broadcast deal, allowing rivals at other conferences to outflank the Pac-12 in college sports’ ruthless race for domination. 
Kliavkoff now presides over the rubble of a once iconic conference. In the last year, eight Pac-12 members have defected to other leagues—including five who rushed to the exits last Friday, when the conference’s future melted down just hours after Kliavkoff thought he had clinched a streaming deal with Apple that would stabilize the Pac-12.
Now the conference has just four remaining members—Stanford, California, Oregon State and Washington State. At the moment, no push is underway to save it, according to people familiar with the matter. Kliavkoff will likely be out of a job if the Pac-12 disbands after June 30, 2024, when its broadcast deal expires.
The Pac-12 was already loaded with problems when Kliavkoff took over from former commissioner Larry Scott in 2021. Many of them were related to the Pac-12 Network, the brainchild of Scott and source of plentiful headaches since its launch in 2012. Lacking lucrative options with networks, the Pac-12 opted to retain full ownership—unlike other conference TV channels that partnered with established networks with national distribution—keeping everything in-house from a gleaming new production studio in downtown San Francisco.
The Pac-12 Network never took off, in part because of its inability to reach an agreement with DirecTV that limited distribution. Poor distribution meant lagging revenue from television rights, putting the Pac-12 in last place among the five major conferences. Tax records show that in the 2021-22 fiscal year, Pac-12 schools received an average disbursement of $37 million; the Big Ten schools received $58 million.
When the Pac-12 leaders sought a replacement for Scott, they thought that their savior might lie in the changing nature of television distribution, said Len Perna—chief executive of executive search firm TurnkeyZRG, which helped hire Kliavkoff—in an interview in May.  
The Pac-12 members told themselves, “We think it’s going to streaming, we need a streaming executive,” Perna said. 
Kliavkoff fit the bill. He had little experience in college sports, but had worked at MLB Advanced Media and NBC Universal, where he helped launch Hulu and at one time served as its interim chief executive. He oversaw cable networks for Hearst Corporation. More recently, he had worked for a virtual reality startup, served on the WNBA’s Board of Governors and led the entertainment and sports division at MGM Resorts International. 
“My background was the unique combination of media and large-scale live entertainment and sports betting and some legislative stuff that collectively I think gave me a unique kind of résumé that I think spoke to the Pac-12 board of directors,” Kliavkoff said in an interview in June.
Then, three weeks after officially taking over on July 1, 2021, the college sports landscape began to change when Texas and Oklahoma announced they would leave the Big 12 for the SEC. According to people familiar with the matter, former Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby approached Kliavkoff about combining his eight remaining schools with the Pac-12 to form a 20-team super conference. 
Kliavkoff was on board, according to a person familiar with his thinking, but the merger failed to clear a subcommittee where Southern California president Carol Folt opposed it, according to people familiar with the matter.
In a statement on Monday, Folt characterized decisions around expansion as confidential and collaborative. “It is laughable to suggest that, in a group of independent and strong-minded leaders, any one president or chancellor had undue sway over anyone else.”
A year later, Kliavkoff and the rest of the Pac-12 were blindsided when USC and UCLA announced a shocking departure for the Big Ten. It was the one scenario that was impossible to defend against, or so an expansion study commissioned by the Pac-12 in the summer of 2021 concluded, according to a person familiar with the matter.
That left Kliavkoff with a clear mandate to keep the conference’s 10 remaining schools together by signing an attractive television deal. He attempted to enter an exclusive negotiating window to extend its existing deals with ESPN and Fox in July 2022. Some Pac-12 board members wanted as much as $50 million per school per year, according to people familiar with the matter, but Kliavkoff told them that about $43 million was a more realistic target. Even so, this was so far above what television partners were willing to pay that a deal never materialized.
Meanwhile, new Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark had approached ESPN and Fox about an early renewal at a much lower asking price that the networks found more palatable, said people familiar with the matter. Thus, the Big 12’s new six-year $2.28 billion deal announced in October leapfrogged the conference past the Pac-12.
The Pac-12 had no choice but to take its broadcast rights to the open market—where the TV industry was increasingly under economic pressure. After months of hoping that the financial climate would improve, the Pac-12 presidents and chancellors on June 30 unanimously voted to give the commissioner a July 31 deadline for the media deal, said a person familiar with the conference.
Kliavkoff eventually delivered two options. One was a traditional five-year deal involving traditional networks, with three cable partners and one digital bidder splitting the Pac-12 rights. It would have eventually given schools a disbursement of about $30 million a year—far less than the Big Ten and SEC, but in line with the new Big 12 deal. 
The second option–a streaming deal with Apple—had more risk and more upside. Schools would start out making less—Arizona president Robert Robbins this week put the figure at $23 million—but could make more depending on how many subscriptions they generated. It would be costly for the conference in other ways: Apple declined to cover production costs associated with football and basketball games, which television executives said can run between $600,000 and $900,000 per game.
But just days before the July 31 deadline, the ground shifted under Kliavkoff’s feet when Colorado announced it was leaving the Pac-12 for the Big 12. The defection caused the more traditional television deal to fall through, said one person familiar with the matter, but Kliavkoff was able to keep Apple interested by suggesting the Pac-12 could add a 10th member. 
Apple declined to comment. 
Kliavkoff presented this revised Apple deal to the Pac-12’s remaining nine presidents and chancellors on Tuesday morning. As late as Thursday evening, Kliavkoff and others in the conference believed that the deal and a new grant of rights—a legal document that binds the schools together for the duration of the television contract—would be finalized at a board meeting scheduled for 7 a.m. Pacific time on Friday morning. Some schools had even sent the Pac-12 office signed copies of the grant of rights, said a person familiar with the matter.
“I genuinely felt that on Friday morning we would sign the needed paperwork [and] finalize the deal with Apple,” wrote Washington State president Kirk Schulz in a letter published Monday.
What Kliavkoff and other Pac-12 presidents didn’t know was that the Big Ten had reengaged in conversations with Oregon and Washington that had been put on ice under former commissioner Kevin Warren. In a closed session late Thursday night, Washington’s Board of Regents decided that what the Big Ten had to offer—a partial share of revenue up to $35 million, and the promise of a full share in the future—was better than anything the Pac-12 could deliver.
“It was about stability,” Washington president Ana Mari Cauce said over the weekend. “It was about having a future that we could count on and build towards.”
On Friday morning, Cauce and her counterpart at Oregon, John Karl Scholz, informed Kliavkoff of their plans to leave for the Big Ten, moves that became official hours later. This killed the Apple deal and prompted Arizona, Arizona State and Utah to follow Colorado to the Big 12 later that evening.
Corrections & Amplifications
The Big 12 announced a six-year $2.28 billion television deal in October. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said $2.28 million.
—Joe Flint contributed to this article.
Write to Laine Higgins at [email protected]

[Pete]

LOL, they told Bowlsby “no” on the offer to save them all, because they trusted their peers.

[Pete]

Kirk could not be reached for comment because it’s crab leg night at the captains table.

[Kid In the Hall]

This is both laughably stupid and simultaneously entirely plausible in an academia setting...

"Kliavkoff was on board, according to a person familiar with his thinking, but the merger failed to clear a subcommittee where Southern California president Carol Folt opposed it, according to people familiar with the matter."

[Pete]

Yep. “Welp, we are not completely unanimous and we assume no one ever lies about business.”

[catastrophe]

It’s hard to believe they had a traditional TV deal in hand similar to the Big 12, and even harder to believe that CU’s departure would have killed it.

[nicname]

https://twitter.com/Brett_McMurphy/status/1689381969430204416?s=20

[wetwillie]

You never really know what to believe but supposedly George K had the same offer Yormark got but earlier and recommended it to the  pac 12 board and they rejected it.

[nicname]

You never really know what to believe but supposedly George K had the same offer Yormark got but earlier and recommended it to the  pac 12 board and they rejected it.

Hubris kills.

[KST8FAN]

Thanks for having my back, Pete!  I guess props to BY to take a decent deal that positioned the Big12 to attract other teams while waiting for the PAC12 debacle to play out.


Tom

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[Perry]

You never really know what to believe but supposedly George K had the same offer Yormark got but earlier and recommended it to the  pac 12 board and they rejected it.

If I'm GK right now, I'm definitely making sure to spread that story whether it's true or not.

[chum1]

They all thought they were worth $50M per school.

[deputy dawg]

They all thought they were worth $50M per school.

 

[Kid In the Hall]

Kliavkoff and Beebe should co-author a book where they do nothing but talk crap about university presidents, how stupid they are and how none of them would ever listen to the league commissioners.

[Pete]

Kliavkoff and Beebe should co-author a book where they do nothing but talk crap about university presidents, how stupid they are and how none of them would ever listen to the league commissioners.

I would buy it