Pac-12 schools have to be nervous about future: There was never a great media deal coming

The vibrations coming out of the Pac-12 are starting to sound like a death march. It’s not quite time to read the last rites, but you might want to keep them nearby just in case. 

In the end, there was no magic bullet, no mystery deal, nothing commissioner George Kliavkoff had up his sleeve. The unsatisfactory truth of the Pac-12’s journey to a new media rights deal is that the negotiations were never going well, the contract was always going to be bad and the reason its conclusion kept getting pushed off into the future was because Kliavkoff held a terrible hand. 

With Colorado’s departure back to the Big 12 last week, Kliavkoff had to lay everything on the table Tuesday during a meeting with Pac-12 presidents. According to ESPN, what he had to show was an offer that would put the bulk of the league’s product on Apple TV for a financial return that would only meet or surpass the Big 12’s $31 million a year payout if certain subscription thresholds were met. 

You can understand why the remaining Pac-12 schools weren’t leaving the big meeting and immediately running to the media to celebrate the great future that lies ahead. What came out instead was a stated intention to have another meeting. 

The question now is how schools like Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, Oregon and Washington digest that information and whether they can stomach a media deal that would leave the Pac-12 in fifth place financially among the major conferences and make its games more difficult to access than the American Athletic Conference. 

There’s no doubt that streaming is and will continue to be a growing part of how we watch television. Every conference already has a streaming component to their media deals, and there is something nice about being able to open an app and find exactly the content you want. The NFL has made its Thursday night game an exclusive on Amazon, MLS has moved to Apple and there’s little doubt the NBA will have a lot more streaming in its next TV deal. It's here to stay.

But for a sport like college football, which still dominates linear television every Saturday from Labor Day weekend through the first week in December, it’s a risky play.

Money and budget certainty are important in college sports, so the bottom-line number that Apple has offered the Pac-12 is far more important than the potential subscriber-based incentives that may or may not be reached. 

Just as big of an issue, however, is visibility. On a college football Saturday, the Pac-12’s competitors will be all over ESPN, ABC, NBC and Fox. You can flip back and forth between them with one remote control. You can stumble onto them by looking at a TV guide. They’ll be on at sports bars and airports all day and night. 

For the last several years, the best thing the league had going for it was the “Pac-12 After Dark” game on ESPN that filled a crucial time slot after all the prime-time games had finished. Why? Simply because it was the last game of the day, and it was on TV, giving those schools a national audience almost all to themselves.   

Is that going to happen on Apple TV? Probably not, because watching a game on a streaming app takes effort and intention. You have to know what you want to watch and where to find it. That’s no problem if you’re a hard-core Cal football fan or love the Washington Huskies and your top priority is watching one particular game. But you’re unlikely to attract many viewers who are just passing by, looking for something to capture their attention. 

Forget the money difference -- that’s a big handicap in recruiting. Not only do prospects want to play on major television networks, it’s hard for them to even know much about these programs if they don’t have easy access to see them play. 

Maybe one day that will change. But for now, it would be an undeniable problem for every coach in the Pac-12 to navigate around. 

There are several schools in the Pac-12 that will have to live with it because they simply don’t have other options. But we know the Big 12 has been courting Arizona for quite some time, and Arizona has been receptive to those overtures. Robert Robbins, the school president, stated quite plainly that Arizona would prefer to stay in the Pac-12 but would have to think seriously about a move if Kliavkoff’s deal came up short. 

From a historical standpoint, the Pac-12 wouldn’t necessarily have a worse football product by losing Colorado and Arizona. In theory, it could replace them with San Diego State and Boise State and have a decent league. But if Arizona is next out the door, how could you blame others for getting jittery about the future? 

After already losing USC and UCLA to the Big Ten, with Washington and Oregon hoping to one day follow them, Arizona State and Utah are also going to have to make decisions based on their own interests. If the Big 12 is offering them spots as well, it might start to look like a safer port in this never-ending storm.

Nobody wants to see the Pac-12 implode. It’s bad for the sport if there’s no West Coast-based league, or if it’s significantly weakened to the point where it looks like a slightly souped-up version of the Mountain West. But unless there’s something else to the deal that Kliavkoff reportedly presented Tuesday, it’s hard to imagine Colorado will be the only defection.