New details of Apple TV deal with Pac-12 show interesting innovation for college football

One of the Pac-12 Conference’s great proponents offered some insight into the media deal that ultimately didn’t come to be, driving a wedge that split the conference for good on Friday. In the aftermath, Arizona State University president Michael Crow offered a bit of a postmortem.

Speaking with reporters on Saturday, Crow explained how the proposed Apple TV streaming deal spooked Oregon and Washington and led to a cascade of departures. But along with being risky, it was also potentially innovative.

“There were a lot of forces at work, including the overlords of the media empires that are out there that were driving a lot of this,” Crow said. “The Colorado departure was really an indication of the fact that there was great instability in the media market and it created an unstable moment. … We were offered a media contract by the Apple corporation which was a technological 23rd century Star Trek thing with really unbelievable capability that we were very interested, ASU was very interested in.”

As Crow described it, it seemed the Apple TV streaming functions would created an on-demand function to watch replays of Pac-12 teams, specifically football and men’s and women’s basketball. This is on top of already streaming them live.

It potentially goes further, as Crow said viewers could theoretically watch multiple games and the playback would be “manipulable.”

“Digitally then manipulable by the watcher both during the game, in between games, in between multiple games at the same time as well as usable by athletes for recruitment and so forth and so on after the games as an archive of things,” Crow said.

However, coming it at a seemingly lower price point than the Big 12 Conference media deal — $31.7 million annually per school — and well below the Big Ten and Southeastern Conferences, the Apple TV deal scared off the two northwestern powers.

When it came time to show up to a virtual meeting on Friday morning to sign over their Grant of Rights for the Apple TV deal, Oregon and Washington no-showed.

Crow, who acknowledged it was a risk, thinks there was also a chance to strike a new opportunity with college sports media. It turns out he and some others had a bigger stomach for risk than some fellow Pac-12 compatriots.

“We thought there was some risk, but huge opportunity. Several of the schools were committed to that, but it created destabilizing moment of traditional versus this modern thing,” Crow said.

It was destabilizing enough for Oregon and Washington to leave for the Big Ten and for the corner schools to bail to the Big 12.