![]() Kliavkoff’s plan was to spend his first weeks on the job as Kumbaya George, visiting each school and taking meetings with all stakeholders, understanding old grievances so he could help break them down.īut three weeks into his tenure, the college sports landscape shook from an unforeseen blast - Texas and Oklahoma were leaving the Big 12 for the SEC.īut Kliavkoff couldn’t just go out and unilaterally fight for the Pac-12. With that experience, it was reasonable for Pac-12 presidents to think he would be equipped to handle their media rights negotiations.Īt the time he was hired, though, his most pressing task was mending campus relationships by showing schools that the league office cared about their various plights. Kliavkoff was an entertainment executive at MGM Resorts in Las Vegas when he landed the Pac-12 job, but he previously worked at Major League Baseball and NBC Universal around the advent of streaming. He maintained until his last days leading the league that it was well-positioned to reach revenue goals in its next media rights agreement, but he would not be the one to see it through. Morale wouldn’t have been an issue if Scott had backed up his promise to make the schools rich. Morale was down among Pac-12 athletic directors, who felt Scott was disconnected from campus realities, spending most of his time at the conference’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco. Sports Did Larry Scott kill the Pac-12? The answer is more complicated than you might thinkįormer commissioner Larry Scott’s media and TV deals couldn’t reach the success of rival conferences, depriving the Pac-12 of millions in revenue. This allowed Scott to constantly trumpet the Pac-12 as the “Conference of Champions” while it fell drastically behind its peers in the Big Ten and SEC in media rights distribution dollars and its self-created Pac-12 Network wallowed in relative obscurity. The league struggled in just about every facet other than the number of championships won in the lower-revenue Olympic sports. The Pac-12 hired Kliavkoff in May 2021 to clean up a mess that was the making of his predecessor, Larry Scott, and the conference’s university leaders. ![]() Stanford, Cal, Washington State and Oregon State are left to the whims of an industry that has become comfortable making momentous long-term decisions while under immense short-term pressure.įollowing interviews with dozens of sources within the Pac-12 and in other corners of college athletics during the last two years, this is the story behind the Pac-12’s collapse. Oregon and Washington are joining USC and UCLA in the Big Ten, while Colorado, Arizona, Arizona State and Utah are headed to the Big 12. While the vote was assumed by many to be mere formality, it certainly could have gone the other direction - a theme that would emerge time and again on the Pac-12’s road to ruin. 14, the UC Regents met and voted 11 to 5 to approve the Bruins’ exit to the Big Ten. Kliavkoff declined to comment on the negotiations that played out quietly behind the scenes. He said he would not have the Ducks in a conference where they have to take less money than UCLA, and any conversation about the possibility quickly died. When Kliavkoff presented the idea to the Pac-12 board, Oregon interim president Patrick Phillips vehemently shut it down. If he could guarantee the Bruins $52 million annually during the five years of the league’s next media deal, the regents promised Kliavkoff a vote heavily in favor of UCLA staying in the Pac-12. So, the regents gave Kliavkoff a magic number. The Bruins’ travel costs to compete in the Midwest-based conference were expected to be in the range of $10 million to $12 million annually. UCLA was supposed to make $62 million per year from the Big Ten’s new mega media rights deal. Privately, Kliavkoff was deeply engaged with a small group of regents about the framework of a deal that would lead to the regents voting to block UCLA’s move - even though the regents did not want to set a precedent of overturning a monumental campus-specific decision. Publicly, the University of California Board of Regents’ threats to force UCLA to stay in the Pac-12 and avoid hurting UC Berkeley were viewed as posturing, bluffs to get attention and possibly some money from the departing Bruins. ![]() UCLA’s Chip Kelly came up with an idea to help rescue college football from it’s money-grubbing self, but it’s too logical for the sport’s power brokers. Sports Chip Kelly’s plan could save college sports, and that’s why it’ll never happen
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