CFB: The Pac-12 is responsible for its own demise

The College football world was turned on its head once again last week. The Pac-12 is imploding and for good reason. Confident as ever at Pac-12 media days, George Kliavkoff stated “Our schools are committed to each other and to the Pac-12. We'll get our media rights deal done; we'll announce the deal. I think the realignment that's going on in college athletics will come to an end for this cycle.”

The deal that was proposed to the members of the Pac 12 was an incentive-laden longshot with Apple TV. In other words, they would have had to reach a certain number of subscribers to get the most out of the deal. I don’t know if anyone reading this has ever tried to stream a sporting event, but it makes me contemplate felonies. Not shockingly, the respectable football programs in the conference bolted knowing they can get a much bigger payday from a traditional tv deal. 

The sad part about this whole situation is not the schools wanting to get better exposure for their student-athletes, it’s the smarter-than-everybody-in-the-room type decision makers who screwed the pooch on the tv deal. Shockingly, the national media attention has garnered sympathy for the schools that remain (Oregon State, Washington State, Cal, and Stanford) instead of ripping into the ineptitude of George Kliavkoff. Listen, in all honesty, the four schools that remain are just the schools that no conference wants or else they would have been gone already too. They are not some white knights “keeping up the integrity of college football.”

The ridiculous takes that some charity plate should be passed around the country for these schools is hilarious. That would not need to happen if their fan bases supported them well enough. Fan support would also have made them more desirable for other conferences, but no conference wants a game attached to their tv deal showing a blimp shot of a stadium half empty. 

The bottom line is college football has always been fueled by money and now that the money is being used to better the sport, people are upset. The Pac-12 was a boring conference anyway except for two teams a year. The concept of taking the best from this conference and making the well-to-do conferences even better should not be lamented. A matchup between USC and Ohio State in primetime at the Horse Shoe sounds a million times better to me than a 3 pm eastern kickoff in Corvallis, Oregon between USC and Oregon State. 

The Pac-12 that remains will be fine when they merge with the Mountain West Conference, which is where these programs belong anyway.