My cousin played for Liverpool my daughter has gone to a lot of their camps
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An old take, but, Iâve thought this from the beginning.
The P12 loses two of its elite programs, leaving 10. One football and one basketball. The B12 loses its two clear-cut elite programs, leaving eight. It adds 4 lower to mid profile programs to get it back to 12. I mean they arenât bad programs but it lost two 900 pound gorillas for a few spider monkeys and all of a sudden the B12 is the superior conference?
Where exactly is the home run, and how does this vault the new B12 over the new P10? Iâd like to add SDSU to the conference, but, itâs like adding Cincinnati or Houston to the B12. Itâs fine, but, we still lost USC and UCLA and SDSU is a far cry from them.
EDIT: B12 has 14 programs right?
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Right now they do. Will be back to 12 once the 900 lb gorillas leave after this coming year.
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Someone in a position to know a lot more than me (which is nothing) told me to be optimistic. Said there are still some hurdles to overcome, but the Pac will have a deal in the next few weeks that will likely be better than the Big 12. Also said the Big 12 is fudging numbers and the deal is not as good as it portrays the deal publicly. Told me not to give up hope.
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Welcome to this board, RealUteFab!
Those of us old-timers with Ute Fan PTSD never give up hope.
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The Deion hire is clear, unmistakable evidence of CUâs desperation, for the reasons you cite and moreâŚ
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Like any contract, the devil is always hiding in the details. That said, selling the alums, fans, and others on the value of the âMax Payoutâ has always been a thing in every walk of life. Itâs nice they have a max payout. I would be more interested in what the base payout is. Also wondering if the broadcast window will have some of them playing 9:00PM CT kickoffs with a lot of regularity. Getting paid is one thing. Playing games with 5 fans in the stands and a TV following of 10 people and a handful of gambling degenerates is not a recipe for success.
I hope what we get is a good base stream and good start times.
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I have not detected a reason to think Canzano is full of â â â â or otherwise getting rope-a-doped. Iâm caring less and less about the media situation, and looking forward to actual CFB and especially next year, an expanded playoff.
"It feels to me as if the Pac-12 knows something the rest of us donât."
In mid-June, a member of the Pac-12 Conference CEO Group told me something that I havenât stopped thinking about.
âFinally feeling no time pressure,â the source said at the time.
The Pac-12 had been engaged for months in its media-rights negotiation. The conference had taken a public beating from outsiders who claimed it was surely left for dead. But internally, the mood was suddenly pressure-free?
What happened exactly?
One member of the CEO Group told me on Tuesday: âThe room just shifted.â
The members had verbally agreed on the grant of rights a couple of weeks earlier. The remaining conference members were on the same page when it came to the sharing of media-rights revenue and unequal distributions of College Football Playoff payouts. They pre-negotiated a number of complex items and had unity. All that was left was the media-rights deal that would seal it all.
Was that it?
Iâll find out, eventually. But I think that shift in mood is important when it comes to framing what weâre about to see play out over the next 10 days. Because it doesnât appear the Pac-12 is in a rush to unveil a media rights deal or expand the conference in front of the July 21 Football Media Day in Las Vegas.
A few things:
⢠Pac-12 Conference Media Day will be held at Resorts World in Las Vegas on July 21 â one week from Friday.
⢠There will not be news on the media-rights front this week, Iâm told by involved sources. Unless something changes or leaks, the conference will head into next week without a deal to talk about.
⢠Pac-12 Football Media Day is ideally about celebrating the upcoming football season. Last yearâs event was held in Los Angeles and was overshadowed by the USC and UCLA defections to the Big Ten.
⢠Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff will be joined on stage at 2023 Football Media Day by Utah athletic director Mark Harlan, who is serving as the chair of the AD group. Last year, it was Kliavkoff on stage with Stanford AD Bernard Muir.
I expect Kliavkoff and Harlanâs mission will be to present a unified front and steer the conversation back to football. Those two will field the brunt of the questions in the early-morning session.
⢠Do the presidents and chancellors care about optics and the public narrative? Absolutely. They have brands to protect. But theyâre also focused on completing a significant and complex negotiation. They must also feel very secure about where they stand. I communicated with two different members of the CEO Group and multiple ADs in the last 72 hours. None of them sounded concerned.
How are they feeling about the media deal?
Said one member of the Pac-12 CEO Group: âAll good, but our timing is not being driven by media narratives or othersâ deadlines.â
⢠The second part of that quote â âothersâ deadlinesâ â feels aimed the San Diego State conundrum. The Mountain West Conference presidents are meeting on Monday to discuss the Aztecsâ membership status.
San Diego State put itself on an island with that clumsy âconsider this notice that weâre thinking about giving you notice â letter sent to the MWC last month. The Aztecs have not been extended a formal invitation by the Pac-12.
⢠There have been changes within the Pac-12 CEO Group of note. Oregonâs newly appointed president John Karl Scholz officially joined the board on July 1. Iâm told by sources that Scholz attended the Pac-12 board meeting on June 30.
⢠Arizona president Dr. Robert Robbins replaced Washington president Ana Mari Cauce on the Pac-12 CEO Groupâs three-member executive committee on July 1. That leadership trio is now comprised of Robbins, Washington State president Kirk Schulz, and Stanfordâs Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Schulz is now the chair.
⢠The public-relations strategy of the Pac-12 in the last year should be a case study how not to handle crisis management. Long stretches of silence were interrupted intermittently by presidents and chancellors sporadically popping their heads up to make inconsistent public comments. They were obviously trying to help, but it felt like a game of academic Whac-A-Mole.
⢠For the last year, Iâve heard consistent messaging from within the CEO Group. The remaining 10 members have repeatedly told me theyâre galvanized. None of them have deviated from that.
The problem over the last year has been external messaging. While I suspect potential media partners (Apple, Amazon, ESPN, FOX, etc.) appreciate the quiet and private approach, Pac-12 fans have suffered and the brand has taken a hit. Itâs worth a careful study from the conference.
Itâs messy to hold a football media day that potentially becomes more about media rights than the players, teams and coaches. But thatâs where the Pac-12 finds itself today.
âFinally feeling no time pressure.â
âThe room just shifted.â
Think about those things.
It feels to me as if the Pac-12 knows something the rest of us donât.
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Hope thatâs all true.
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I certainly hope so too, but Iâm starting to feel a bit uneasy about the PACxx. Perhaps my misgivings are just from the lack of updates from the conference powers that be. Only time will tell, since time reveals all.
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We donât want to be doing what the B 12 did with their menagerie of schools they invited to fill the allotment. Adding schools isnât the goal. Adding the right schools to invite should be the standard.
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Adding schools isnât the goal. Adding the right schools to invite should be the standard
Blockquote
Thatâs what Iâm most proud of. Not only did we win 7 PAc titles this year, we also excell in research, graduation rates, overall GPAâs, student section, etc. etcâŚ
GoooOO UTES!!
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And the jokes keep writing themselves.
I smell a TDS response.
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Dave McCann is already writing his Desperate News article about how the B12âs value is increased exponentially after losing Texas & OU but then adding byu.
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McCann has a really âinterestingâ narrative writing style:
âMy wife had me vacuum our downstairs play room for one of our grandchildrenâs birthday party. Back and forth over the shag carpet, steady progress toward a worthy goal. Which got me thinking about the BYU inaugural season in the Big-12, a wonderful collection of schools in mid-America, where many farmers have likewise gone back and forth over the Lordâs good Earth.â
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This has been discussed already but it looks like Bob Iger is quite serious. This has to have some impact on the overall picture (no pun intended). I am not sorry to see any event that might weaken ESPN.
While Iger is open to selling some of Disneyâs TV assets, the company will likely seek a strategic partner for ESPN to help it transition to a direct-to-consumer model. He said the company has had some conversations with potential partners.
The so-called linear TV business was once the bedrock of Disneyâs sprawling entertainment empire in terms of profits. Carriage fees and advertising revenues generated by the division buoyed Disneyâs earnings and allowed the company to spend heavily on other businesses such as streaming that were in their early, more capital-intensive growth phases.
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