Hello Friends. For those of you around the world, what follows may or may not be interesting. It is about the collapse of an American football college conference that had existed for more than 100 years. But I suppose it's also about the the state of the world in general, in some ways. I'm posting it here because I'm mad and disillusioned.
Post Mortem on the Pac
(An Angry Coug's Thoughts on the Demise of the Pac-12)
By Eric Johnson
What strange bedfellows they make, the University of Washington and their hated rivals, the University of Oregon, now forever linked in history as the shrewd duo that burned the Pac-12 Conference to the ground. Or, at the very least, threw the last match on its smoldering remains.
A picture emerges of ambiguous behavior, of knowing winks and crossed fingers behind the back, fronted by promises and pledges and vows of solidarity. Backchannel deals in the night, fueled by the kind of all-consuming ambition that isn't talked about in pep rallies and fight songs.
In December of 2022, once the shock wore off when USC and UCLA announced that they were leaving the Pac-12 and joining the Big 10, the question was obvious: what will Oregon and Washington do? That's because of power and money and national visibility, things those institutions have earned over time (in Oregon's case, thanks to a billion dollars from the founder of Nike).
For the longest time the silence from Montlake and Eugene was deafening. No announcements of solidarity. No "Circle the wagons" statements. At least not publicly.
Their silence was like chum into shark-infested waters.
And so we waited.
Make no mistake: the silence and the eventual abandonment of the Pac-12 was never about the well-being of student-athletes or academic considerations or the mission statements of institutions of higher learning. This was about something far more important. Money.
TV money.
Thursday, August 3. They had a deal. Ask WSU's President Kirk Schulz. Ask Dr. Michael Crow, ASU's longtime President. Or Oregon State's Athletic Director Scott Barnes. Ask any of them. They had a deal.
They'd agreed in principle to a media rights package with Apple. Pac-9 games (Colorado, by this time, had also abandoned the Pac) would be carried on a subscription streaming-based model, which is where sports programing is headed anyway, right?
Arizona State president Dr. Michael Crow described it this way: "We were offered a media contract by the Apple corporation that was really a technological, 23rd century Star Trek thing of really unbelievable capability that we were really very interested in."
Kirk Schulz, one of the longest tenured of any of the presidents involved, and who'd taken on a leadership role in negotiations, called it, "an innovative and forward-looking partnership proposal with Apple" that would "significantly grow the revenue coming into each school over the next several years."
It was not a garbage deal. It was forward thinking. It was an attempt to preserve the past by boldly venturing into the future. Various reports indicate it would have guaranteed schools between $23-$25-million per year early on, and that by year three, the deal would have eclipsed what Big-12 and ACC teams are getting.
Was it as much money as a school might get by forsaking everything and selling itself to the highest bidder? No, it was not.
But it wasn't garbage.
Schulz said, "We finished our board meeting on Thursday evening with a strong feeling of staying together, pursuing a new partnership with Apple, and moving forward with conference expansion."
One imagines a sense of unity in that last meeting Thursday night, a kind of collegial camaraderie. Pushed to the brink, they were pushing back. It must have felt good. ASU President Crow says, "We were the stalwarts fighting for the Pac-12, til the last inch."
Oregon State Athletic Director Scott Barnes put it this way: "(We were) literally hours away from a deal that everybody could embrace."
That night, the chair of the WSU Board of Regents, Lisa Schauer got an encouraging update.
"On Thursday," she says, "WSU President Kirk Schulz and Athletics Director Pat Chun presented to me an innovative media plan that would position the Pac-12 to lead the Power Five conferences into the future."
But there was another meeting. It was a 10:30pm closed door emergency meeting of the UW Board of Regents.
Maybe it was interrupted by a phone call from the Big-10. Or maybe that call came the next morning.
The rest of the league presidents and chancellors slept well. Why wouldn't they? They had banded together and saved the conference. Just a few signatures away...
John Canzano, a columnist and radio host in Portland who's been on the front edge of reporting on the Pac-12 for many years, says, "After they broke the meeting, as they went to bed they believed they were on the same page."
Canzano believes that it was early Friday morning that the Big-10 came calling. Again. It might have been as early as 5am.
They upped their offer. Washington and Oregon would get a 50% share of the Big-10 media rights deal with Fox/NBC/CBS for six years (about $35-million per year) and then when the NEXT deal came around, they would get full shares. Theoretically over $70-million per year.
What a grotesque Frankenstein monster we've created.
The Pac-12 (what was left of it) CEO group was scheduled to meet at 7am Friday morning to sign their deal with Apple.
Eight minutes before that meeting was scheduled to start, Kirk Schulz's phone vibrated. UW President Ana Mari Cauce had sent him a text message. She told him that the Huskies were leaving the Pac for the Big-10. Thanks for the memories.
Minutes later Oregon President John Karl Scholz informed the conference that his school was leaving for the Big-10.
Schulz said he was, "shocked."
"Stunned" was the word WSU Regents chair Lisa Schauer used.
Oregon State AD Scott Barnes said, "I'm furious."
They really fooled 'em all, didn't they? Snookered the whole lot. What a bunch of suckers.
Ana Mari Cauce got in front of a camera not long after. She pumped her fists when she talked about Washington's "very real excitement at joining the Big-10 Conference."
"This is a great move," she said.
She said something else, too. "In the end we had to do what was right."
And that was it.
Arizona and Arizona State were the next to fall, grudgingly. Together they'd pledged to stay in the Pac-12 unless the UW and Oregon bailed. They accepted an invitation to join the Big-12.
Utah left the same day.
Maybe I should grow up. Maybe I should have realized that the big guys always step on the little guys. That it's ALWAYS about money, stupid. Always. It's the way of the world.
See, my problem is I keep forgetting that the world works that way. Like a child, I keep believing in other things. Shame on me.
It's possible that none of it ever really meant anything. The rivalries, the history, the 108 years. The road trips and the tailgates and the trash talk. All that hugging and backslapping in the grandstands, the singing of fight songs and the little tears that formed in the corner of our eyes when we charged onto the field and jumped up and down like fools.
Maybe it's been a load of nonsense the whole time, all the way back to when my Dad drove me to Pullman to watch the great Jack Thompson slay giants. "The Cougs'll find a way, Pal, you just watch and see," he used to say.
Seems so silly now.
"It stinks," John Canzano says. "They did what was best for them. They did not do what was best for athletes or fans or tradition or rivalry. They did what was best for themselves."
UW President Cauce said something else the other day. She said with a straight face, "There is no question that the Apple Cup is a cherished tradition. And we want to continue our long history with the Cougars."
How laughable. How rich.
Budgets will tighten in Pullman and Corvallis, and maybe at Cal and Stanford too. Athletes will leave, jobs will be cut, traditions will die. Lives will be changed.
In the end, the most infuriating thing for the Cougar faithful is that when all was said and done, after 108 years of scrapping and fighting and believing, of slapping Husky hands away when they tried to pat us on the head, after all that, in the end, WSU's fate lay squarely in the hands of... the University of Washington.
But wait, that's not entirely true. Not entirely. Because the more we learn about what happened during the death throes of the Pac-12, the more we realize that it was Oregon pulling the wagon the whole time, and that the University of Washington was just along for the ride.
Says Canzano, "This was 100% Oregon driven." One principal player painted for him the metaphor of a bunch of cowboys at a table in a saloon, shaking hands with some of their guns drawn under the table. The biggest gun was green, not purple.
Canzano's sources tell him that Washington was never going to go it alone. Oregon might have, and it would've taken guts. But not the Huskies. For all of their Bow Down bravado and disdain for all things green and yellow, they were going to do whatever Oregon did. Just follow along.
Strange bedfellows indeed.
A long time ago, when baseball owners were wrestling with the concept of revenue sharing, George Steinbrenner famously said, "I own the NY Yankees, not the Seattle Mariners." In other words, to hell with the rest of them.
The University of Washington has certainly the right to say, "We're the U-Dub, not WSU." To hell with the rest of them.
But having the right is not the same as BEING right.
And what happened last week wasn't right. It never will be.
They'll make a lot of money. They'll be rich!
But do you know what I think? I think every time they cash one of those fat network checks there will be a little voice in the back of their heads, nagging at them, softly at first and then louder and louder, about something they'd like to forget.
They destroyed a thing that was beautiful.
