The bum who runs the Grading The Week staff meetings now says he’s met George Kliavkoff a couple times. Nice guy. Great teeth.
But to paraphrase a GTW movie favorite, “Jaws,” the embattled Pac-12 commissioner is now the mayor of Shark City. There’s blood all over the water now. And the teams in his league don’t want to be the ones lining up to become somebody else’s hot lunch.
There’s a little bit of the fictional Larry Vaughn in the real Kliavkoff, whose public statements about his conference, and its future, seem to be drifting further and further from reality. And by finally throwing up its hands and joining the Big 12, of all places, a league it ran away from 13 years ago, the CU Buffs just swam up and bit Gorgeous George square on the backside.
George Kliavkoff — F
He trusted the Big Ten. Bad idea. He stood pat when the southern half of the Big 12 was looking for a lifeline in 2021. Also bad. He let the Big 12 jump him in the line last fall to grab the money from ESPN and FOX. Hella bad.
In his defense, Kliavkoff was handed a fixer-upper thanks to Larry Scott, who used the Pac-12 like an ATM and then jumped from a metaphorical burning plane while riding a golden parachute.
But Gorgeous George completely whiffed on the second rule of college athletics. No. 1, of course, is follow the money. No. 2 is, if you don’t grab what you can, when you can, somebody else sure as heck will.
When Texas and Oklahoma staggered the Big 12 two summers ago, the vultures started circling again. What remained of the old Big 12 south begged the Pac-12 for a lifeline. The chancellors and presidents reportedly weren’t crazy about Baylor and TCU for the same reasons they’ve never been crazy about BYU. They passed.
In hindsight, that now marks the second time in a dozen years the Pac-12 could’ve wiped the Big 12 off the map, effectively, and didn’t. Back in 2010, Scott stopped short of giving Texas the moon while he still had a chunk of it — or claimed he did, at any rate — and the Pac-16 never materialized.
CU’s reasons for joining the Pac-10 (as it was known) at the time were (and are) partly defensible, given the way its donors skew to the West. But there’s an alternate reality where you wonder what would’ve happened had the Buffs decided 13 years ago to stay put.
Because while the Buffs went surfing, former Big Eight commish Chuck Neinas came to the rescue to broker peace between Austin and the rest of the survivors and try to forge a path forward. Which he did, snapping up the next-best brands available, snatching a Texas school with growth potential that paid off (TCU) and a proven east-coast brand that made no sense geographically (West Virginia) but nonetheless opened the doorway to earlier kickoffs, adding a second time zone — the Eastern one, where a ton of TV sets reside — to the footprint.
While Kliavkoff took the stage at Las Vegas last week during the league’s football media day and dismissed talk of conference defections (“Not a concern,” he claimed), Ralphie literally and figuratively had one hoof out the door. Even if CU won’t be missed much as a football program, except by other Pac-12 opponents, it was a terrible, myopic look for the commish.
College sports is being proactive and leading with football and television. The Pac-12 sat on its hands and wanted to talk about anything but. Good riddance.
