The Breakup of the PAC-12: Insights and Reflections

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00:00Do you really? I never thought it should have, uh, you know, broken up. I seriously, I thought

00:08it was a great conference. Maybe they had bad decision, bad people running it. Who knows?

00:15I never thought it should have ended. And I think that they're trying to save it is

00:19a good thing. And I loved it. You didn't like watching those basketball games and the West

00:26really was rooting hard for the PAC 12 to remain together. I understood why USC and

00:31UCLA left with the opportunity they had to make the money they would make and to compete

00:35at the level that the big 10 will compete with the SEC, et cetera. I understood that

00:40I, after that I was hopeful that the PAC 12 would survive, but Scott, they did it to themselves.

00:47At that point, their, their contract was worth X number of dollars and they asked for X plus

00:53and they stood firm at X plus and it, and it backfired on them because the ESPN said,

00:59okay, we'll just go sign up the big 12 instead. And you guys can do whatever you want to do.

01:05And then there was no one left to bid for them. Uh, the, at that point, uh, Fox wasn't

01:09interested and there were only so many players in this market. The only other player at that

01:13point was Apple, which meant going entirely online and the money would have been sufficient,

01:18but they felt skeptical about whether they'd be able to recruit in an entirely online world,

01:24an entirely, uh, streaming world. And so they bopped at that. And then before long, uh,

01:31you saw Oregon and Washington peel off to the big 10. And then it was pretty much over.