Breaking down what held up Pac-12 media rights decision, expansion talk

It’s been 13 months since the Pac-12 announced its plans to start media rights negotiations in light of USC and UCLA’s departures. Still, no deal has come to fruition, even as Pac-12 presidents and athletic directors met Tuesday before adjourning without a decision.

The Pac-12 has made it clear it’s not planning to expand until it has a media rights deal in place. San Diego State and SMU have emerged as potential targets, but no move has been made to this point as the conference looks to drop to nine teams in 2024 after three teams — USC, UCLA and Colorado — depart.

As for what the hold-up is, John Canzano pointed to a few reasons the league is still in a bit of a holding pattern.

“I think one is you’re dealing with academics in that room,” Canzano told On3’s Andy Staples on Andy Staples On3. “And the Pac-12 presidents and chancellors, I think, are a little different than maybe some of the other conferences. They’re not pirates, they’re not aggressive, some of them are not all that tuned in to sports and they have long been on their high horse about academics and culture. And that stuff’s important. I get it. But I think they’ve moved too slowly here and I think Colorado, ultimately, lost patience. I think we saw that this week. The USC-UCLA thing, I think was a little bit naive. I think that they should have been more tuned in to those two schools, not being as engaged and I think that was a big misfire early in the George Kliavkoff tenure.

“But yeah, let’s go back to March. They had approved exploration. It was San Diego State [and] SMU, as we all know now, they were one and two. I think Colorado State was one of the top four. I haven’t confirmed that. But it was loosely confirmed to me early on that they had poked around Colorado State. I don’t know if that was a contingency move or if they were just exploring it, but they may now have to go full boat into that.”

How the Pac-12 looked at expansion amid media rights talks

The Pac-12 has had to weigh dollars with exposure during its media rights negotiations, as On3’s Eric Prisbell reported in February. But as three programs prepare to leave, the value of the league could take a hit, Canzano said.

If San Diego State and SMU are real targets for expansion, that could help improve the final figure in the media rights deal. But it might not have been that simple early on as UCLA’s move to the Big Ten wasn’t a foregone conclusion right away.

“The media executives I’ve talked with say, ‘Look, at least at face value, you need to know who’s in who’s committed from your members and who are you potentially adding?'” Canzano said. “Now, I’ve been told they ran several different models, including if you go back to last December. They were running models that included UCLA returning in the event of UC regents’ [meeting]. So maybe that explains some of the early pause. Maybe they were holding out hope that UCLA would come back. They would just replace them with San Diego State.

“But you’re right, that order of operations doesn’t make sense. … You need to know, is SMU part of this conference? Is San Diego State part of this conference? That’s how you come up with the total value. I was told early on by multiple members of the CEO group that they really wanted to nail down the deal first. Then, they were going to pivot to the members and go [to] their potential media partners and go, ‘Okay, does San Diego State add x value, y value? Okay, we can bring them in. Does SMU?’ It feels a little clunky and formulaic to me and a little naive. And now that we look at it, we could argue that there was a misfire there.”