The parking attendant outside Denver Coliseum Friday wore a Buffs hat and a frown.
“Pac-12 or Big 12?” I asked.
“Oh, Big 12,” he replied, firmly, without so much as a pause. “Oh, yeah. Big 12.”
“Why?”
“I want to kick Nebraska’s (censored) again.”
“Yeah, but …”
“Yeah, yeah, they’re Big Ten, I know.”
“No Pac-12 love, huh?”
“Nope. Joining that league was the worst thing they could’ve done.”
Thank the stars for Deion Sanders.
Coach Prime is must-see TV, win or lose, ratings gold, a football spectacle of swag, style and substance TBD. And can you imagine where the Buffs might be without him, given the parameters of the Pac-12’s new media rights deal?
What’s that? Oh, right. Or lack thereof?
As of this weekend, the league was still flying in stealth mode, the geese snickering behind commish George Kliavkoff’s back. The Pac-12 is the last Power 5 conference at the table negotiating a national TV contract, creating the perception — not necessarily reality, mind you — that they’ll be left with table scraps. If you Google “Pac-12, ION” with one hand, be sure to leave the other free to palm your face with.
While Big 12 Commissioner Brent Yormark was rolling with Shaquille O’Neal and yapping about expansion during conference tournament week, Kliavkoff came off as the strong, silent type. Minus the strong.
“Not saying anything,” a source told me last week, “is worse than saying, ‘We’re working on it.’”
They are, but the longer this drags, the louder the silence gets. The trouble with strategic quiet when the stakes are this high is that it creates a vacuum, and the first thing to fill that hole is speculation. The second is outright panic.
“(Not having USC and UCLA) hurts them, there’s no question about that,” former Big 12 and Big Eight commissioner Chuck Neinas noted. “The only way the Big 12 could take (the Buffs and other Pac-12 expatriates) is to go back to their TV partners and say, ‘If we’re bringing in four more (schools), we need more money.’”
And therein lies the rub. Streaming is almost assuredly a part of the next Pac-12 rights deal, largely because a lot of legacy media — CBS and Turner Sports, most notably — are tapped out. And even if the Big 12 is reportedly pulling in $31 million per member, or slightly more than half of its Big Ten peers, at least they got their mitts inside the cash drawer before the window shut.
The threat of recession thrust broadcasting giants into belt-tightening mode across the board. Disney has made no secret about slashing overhead, while the merger of Warner Media and Discovery has been felt from cuts at CNN, Turner Classic Movies and HBO Max to forcing the Rockies to scramble for a new television home.
“It could be two things that are what’s (making it) take so long,” Bob Thompson, the media consultant and former FOX Sports Networks president offered recently. “One is the complications of a college contract, especially for new entrants (into college sports), which might be the case here, if it’s Amazon.
“No. 2 is, they aren’t at the number they want yet.”
I don’t trust Kliavkoff ant farther than I can throw him. But I also understand CU’s public fealty to all things Pac-12, for now, at least from an administrative standpoint. For one, the per-team payout is expected to land in the Big 12’s ballpark. Second, the Big Ten has allegedly pumped the brakes on expansion until the calendar gets closer to the expiration of its next TV deal (2030) … which also puts a hold on the best (and most logical) escape hatch for Oregon and Washington.
Third, it’s about playing to the base, and CU’s alumni umbrella primarily spans from Denver to the Pacific Ocean. And yes, a smaller Pac-12, in theory, without USC and UCLA — the Buffs are 3-20 against both since 2011, 0-11 vs. the Trojans — makes for a shorter climb to the top of the standings. And a shorter path, also theoretically, into an expanded playoff. Hippie Boulder is Pac-12 to the core. Deep down, it always has been.
But in joining the tribe, CU also lost, from a football perspective, what made it special. The Berkeley of the Big 12, as my Nebraska friends loved to sneer, is just Berkeley East now. Kids from Florida and Texas and Louisiana could be swayed by the stuff they’d never seen in person — purple mountain majesties, Palisade peaches and Rocky Mountain oysters. Most California recruits have already been to an In-N-Out.
At the same time, how much smoother would the sales pitches in the Lone Star and Sunshine States become for Coach Prime, an icon at Florida State and with the Dallas Cowboys, if the Buffs were playing games there on a regular basis? And playing in the Central and Eastern time zones, where two-thirds of the country’s television sets reside?
Flip side: Good luck with those alumni pep rallies in Morgantown, W.Va., nevermind Ames and Stillwater. The new Big 12 is more quantity than quality, a Frankenstein stitch-up conjoining the elite of 2002 Conference USA (TCU, Houston, Cincinnati) with the coach section of the old Big Eight (Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Iowa State).
Frankenstein has what Kliavkoff doesn’t, though: A national TV deal.
“A lot of things have changed in the last seven-eight months since they entered the process,” Thompson continued. “The perfect example is the folks at Disney HQ telling ESPN, ‘We might have to be a little more selective in what you buy.’ You’ve got NBA rights coming up, you’ve got the CFP coming up … you can’t own everything. So you probably have to be selective on how much you pay for other things. You have your ‘must-haves’ and your ‘nice-to-haves.’”
For Buffs fans, it sure would be nice to have some clarity.
