Colorado confirms return to Big 12 after leaving for Pac-12 in 2011
Story by Paul Myerberg, USA TODAY . 48m ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/spor...12-in-2011/ar-AA1es6Xa

Big Ten examining potential additions of Oregon, Washington, California and Stanford to conference
The Big Ten is taking a preliminary look at further expansion amid growing uncertainty on the West Coast

https://www.cbssports.com/coll...tanford-to-conference/

Dominoes...

FSU President Sends Major Message To ACC During Board of Trustees Meeting
Story by Dustin Lewis . 56m ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/auto...es-meeting/ar-AA1eHJIs

Looks like it's time for Arizona State to leave Pac-12 and join Arizona in Big 12
Story by Michelle Gardner, Arizona Republic . 44m ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/spor...-in-big-12/ar-AA1eIoMf

The Arizona Board of Regents has called for an executive meeting Thursday night to address the situation involving the athletic departments of both schools. The Big 12 is meeting too so the dominoes appear to be lining up.

Big 12 executives met Thursday to approve the application of Arizona as a 14th member, sources tell
@YahooSports
, paving the way for the Wildcats to enter the conference. It is another step in UA's path to join. The final step would be approval from its Board of Regents.

Sources: Arizona deal with Big 12 expected to be finalized soon

Big Ten has cleared way for Oregon and Washington to apply for membership
By Ralph D. RussoAssociated Press







The Big Ten has cleared the way for Oregon and Washington to apply for membership in the conference, four people familiar with the negotiations told The Associated Press on Friday.

The people spoke on condition of anonymity because the conference and schools were finalizing an official agreement and announcement.

Is nobody paying attention?

WooHoo!

Sources: Both Utah and Arizona State have applied for formal membership to the Big 12 Conference, and there's a call tonight with the Big 12's presidents and chancellors to discuss their membership. Arizona applied and was approved yesterday.

BREAKING: Arizona, Arizona State & 2-time defending Pac-12 champion Utah joining Big 12 in 2024 pending Big 12 formal approval in next 24 hours,

in other words....Get UCF season tix now. There is a waiting list. Good Luck!

Big 12 approves additions of Utah, Arizona State, bringing league to 16 teams

Beginning with the 2024-25 academic year, the Big 12 Conference will be comprised of 16 members - Arizona, Arizona State, Baylor, BYU, UCF, Cincinnati, Colorado, Houston, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, TCU, Texas Tech, Utah and West Virginia.

'All hell broke loose': The chaotic final days that shook the Pac-12 and college football to their core

The Athletic College Football
Aug 10, 2023
By Justin Williams, Nicole Auerbach, Scott Dochterman and Max Olson

As Thursday inched toward Friday, leaders at the universities of Oregon and Washington were wavering.

It was Aug. 3, one day before conference realignment would once again send tremors through the landscape of college sports. The Pac-12, the country's preeminent West Coast league, was about to be stripped for parts by the television networks, its fellow conferences and its own ghastly mismanagement. But it wasn't dead yet. The conference, whittled to nine remaining members, was teetering as the Big Ten and Big 12 circled overhead. Yet quietly, cautiously, there was renewed optimism within the league office that the Pac-12 may still have a future.

Just after 10:30 p.m. PDT, the University of Washington Board of Regents adjourned a virtual "closed door" special meeting to discuss the future of its athletic programs. Along with the University of Oregon, its border-state rival 300 miles south, the two schools weighed offers to leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten - the richest athletics conference in America with annual revenues projected to top $1 billion by 2024 - and were widely expected to follow the money.

But as founding members of the original Pacific Coast Conference in 1915, each had its own reservations about leaving. There was hope that Arizona, linked to the Big 12, might jump first and lessen the blow. Oregon president John Karl Scholz, in particular, was hesitant to leave Cal and Stanford behind, according to two conference sources familiar with the process, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the internal discussions. Scholz also was intrigued by the proposed media-rights partnership with Apple that Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff had presented to the conference earlier in the week, according to the two sources. That deal was entirely dependent on a subscription-based streaming service as opposed to traditional television networks. Devised with subscription escalators, it was an innovative yet risky proposition that could potentially yield a big payday. Or flop in debilitating fashion.

Oregon and Washington had another issue: The schools had only a verbal agreement in place with the Big Ten, and neither felt comfortable walking away from the Pac-12 without something more concrete, according to one conference source familiar with the process. Meanwhile, the Big Ten was receiving pushback on its expansion efforts from multiple athletic directors within the conference, according to four league sources, despite the necessary support of the university presidents.

With a 7 a.m. meeting of Pac-12 presidents scheduled for Friday, Aug. 4, there was a growing sense that Oregon and Washington to the Big Ten could fizzle.

"We were all expecting, Friday morning, we were showing up together to sign in blood our grant of rights over to the Pac-12 Conference," Arizona president Robert Robbins said.

Only it didn't happen. Minutes before the meeting, Oregon and Washington informed the league office that the programs would, in fact, be joining the Big Ten. "Blindsided" was the word used by a person familiar with the proceedings.

At the eleventh hour, the Ducks and Huskies received necessary assurances from the Big Ten, including an analysis of the conference's long-term revenue projections and what they could potentially collect as members down the road.

"Listen, all along we've done everything we could to find an opportunity forward with the Pac-12. Over the last few days, obviously, the opportunity presented itself with the Big Ten," Oregon athletic director Rob Mullens said on Friday. "I'd say in the last 24 hours is when it really intensified, and wasn't done until the early, early hours of the morning."

Oregon and Washington to the Big Ten was official by dinnertime Friday. Fellow Pac-12 members Arizona, Arizona State and Utah made a similar dash for the exits and joined the Big 12 a few hours later.

The announcements punctuated 96 hours of pure realignment chaos. It started with Kliavkoff's ill-fated presentation of the Apple partnership, followed by a bevy of special board meetings and back-channel machinations.

It ended with the Big Ten and Big 12 expanding (again), the Pac-12 in ruins, and the further destruction of regionality and tradition within college athletics, as college football moved ever closer to a super-conference reckoning.

The groundwork for Friday's demolition began in earnest a few days earlier. The Pac-12 presidents and chancellors met virtually around 7 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 1, for specifics on a new media-rights deal that would initiate in 2024.

The details, reported by The Athletic's Stewart Mandel, included a five-year, subscription-based streaming package from Apple with a base annual rate of $23 million per school. (A subsequent counteroffer elevated that rate to $25 million.) Kliavkoff's pitch leaned heavily on subscription incentives the commissioner claimed would help Pac-12 members to surpass the Big 12's reported $31.7 million annual average and even close the gap on the Big Ten and SEC, both of which project to roughly double the Big 12 mark. There were no guarantees of a linear component that would broadcast games on traditional television networks.

The offer represented a critical juncture for the conference, but to best explain the calamity that ensued, one must understand the breakdowns that preceded it, and an additional offer that never materialized.

Way back on July 5, 2022, five days after USC and UCLA announced their departures to the Big Ten, Pac-12 presidents authorized Kliavkoff to open a 90-day exclusive negotiating window with ESPN and Fox. According to three sources involved in the discussions, ESPN and the conference got closer to a workable number, but the window passed without a deal. In the meantime, Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark famously leapfrogged the Pac-12 to renegotiate its own rights deal with ESPN and Fox that didn't expire until 2025. It established the $31.7 million annual rate that proved to be a bar the Pac-12 couldn't clear.

It would be a full year before Kliavkoff procured a firm offer.

On June 30, the Pac-12 members privately set a July 31 deadline for Kliavkoff to finally present a deal. At the conference's media days in Las Vegas on July 21, Kliavkoff publicly praised league members for their patience and claimed it would be rewarded with a rights offer that had improved over time.

"I will tell you what we've seen is the longer we wait for the media deal, the better our options get," Kliavkoff said.

Those plans were upended, however, when Colorado elected to flip to the Big 12 on July 27, before any of the Pac-12 media numbers were provided.


Two sources - one conference and one industry - familiar with the negotiations told The Athletic that before Colorado's departure, Kliavkoff believed he had pieced together a second option involving four media companies. Those sources described the deal as a combination of three linear partners (ESPN, Fox and CBS) and one streaming partner (Amazon), with CBS only bidding on a limited number of men's basketball games. But around the same time Colorado left, Amazon declined to submit a formal proposal, according to a media executive familiar with the process, and the accompanying linear bids were viewed as too small to present to the conference.

The conference source said that Colorado's departure also caused ESPN to pull back because it now owed the Big 12 an agreed-upon pro-rata share for adding a power-conference program. Apple was not interested in joining any linear partners as part of a deal, according to an industry source familiar with the negotiations.

Regardless, by the end-of-July deadline, there was no second offer.

Despite having only the Apple specifics to present to the league presidents on the morning of Tuesday, Aug. 1, immediate response to the deal was mixed, even among soon-to-be-departing members. In addition to sources describing Scholz, Oregon's president, as intrigued, Arizona State president Michael Crow described the Apple offer as "a technological, 23rd-century, 'Star Trek' thing with really unbelievable capability that ASU was very interested in."


For others, especially on the heels of Colorado's exit, a streaming-dependent subscription wasn't enough to stop them from entertaining the more stable and lucrative guarantees they had been holding at bay.

"We were trying to think, well, it's going to be like selling candy bars for Little League or Girl Scout cookies," Robbins said. "You gotta convince 3 (million) to 5 million people every year to sign up for $100 a year to watch a streaming-only app."

Based on public comments from leadership at all six of the recently departed Pac-12 programs - Colorado included - the lack of traditional, linear broadcast partners was just as much of a sticking point as the revenue base.

"In the end, we looked at the deal that we had - the only deal that we had - and it was clear that it was not giving us what we thought. It was not the deal we had been discussing just days before," Washington president Ana Mari Cauce said. "I do think some level of linear TV mattered. We have a history with the Pac-12 Networks that wasn't a good one. ... We had been living in uncertainty for too long to continue at that level. It makes it very, very hard to build."

Coming out of the Aug. 1 meeting, the Pac-12 presidents and chancellors agreed to present the Apple offer to their respective boards and reconvene on the morning of Friday, Aug. 4, according to a Pac-12 source familiar with the plan. But from there, the chess pieces started shifting. Arizona, tabbed as the Big 12's next expansion target after Colorado, had already scheduled a special board meeting for Tuesday afternoon.

By Wednesday, the Wildcats submitted a letter officially seeking Big 12 membership, according to two conference sources, the same day news broke that a subgroup of Big Ten presidents held exploratory discussions about potentially adding Oregon and Washington, as well as Cal and Stanford. This was also the same day Florida State eagerly hoisted itself into the realignment discourse when its Board of Trustees publicly threatened to leave the ACC over media revenue imbalance.

On Thursday, Aug. 3, Big Ten presidents authorized commissioner Tony Petitti to explore expansion and seek more information on Oregon and Washington specifically as potential additions. The two schools had been vetted by the Big Ten when the conference added USC and UCLA in summer 2022, but this was also the first opportunity for a major splash by Petitti, who was hired in April.

On the Big 12 front, Yormark called an emergency meeting Thursday afternoon with the Big 12 leadership, and the board voted to approve Arizona's membership, according to three league sources. Arizona and Washington both held special board meetings that evening as well, amping speculation that realignment moves were imminent. Two Pac-12 sources also claimed that Kliavkoff had not been communicative as the week progressed with multiple Pac-12 programs who had options to leave the conference.

Amid all this drama, the Arizona schools, which share the same Board of Regents, remained a curious hypothetical. Robbins attended the Thursday special meeting believing that he had the necessary support from the board to facilitate Arizona joining the Big 12, according to a person briefed on the discussions, and there was hope that the regents would encourage Crow to pursue the same.

"(Robbins) went into the board meeting, and all hell broke loose," the source told The Athletic.

Instead, Crow was adamant about Arizona State remaining in the Pac-12 and working to preserve the conference - a stance he reiterated publicly over the weekend - and the Board of Regents recommended to Robbins that the two universities remain aligned, the source said.

"We were the stalwarts fighting for the Pac-12 until the last ditch," Crow told reporters on Saturday, later adding, "Arizona and Arizona State decided we wouldn't split up under any circumstances. You can ask President Robbins about that."

Robbins echoed as much a couple days later. Responding to a question about Arizona's move to the Big 12 being a done deal by Thursday of last week, Robbins said, "That's not true."

"This was something that the two of us thought was in the best interest of the state for both of our universities, for the rivalry, for both of us to stay together," Robbins told reporters.

Arizona requesting and receiving a Big 12 invitation are hardly the actions of a program that truly intended to sign the Pac-12's grant of rights on Friday morning, but it all became moot once Oregon and Washington bolted minutes before the call. That effectively nullified the Pac-12's offer from Apple and left Arizona, Arizona State and Utah hurriedly dialing the Big 12 for a lifeline.

Oregon and Washington will join the Big Ten in 2024 as partial media-rights members at an average annual rate in the low- to mid-$30 millions - roughly half of what full-share members will earn, according to a source familiar with the negotiations. Fox upped that amount at one point at Petitti's request, according to the same source, as the Big Ten stressed to the schools how the final-year, full-member revenue payout for the upcoming deal will essentially be a starting point for those two as full members in 2030. Meanwhile, the revenue distribution for current Big Ten schools was not diluted by the additions of Oregon and Washington. "Fox brought new money to the table," Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith said Wednesday.

In the Big 12, the four Pac-12 defections joining in 2024 will immediately receive full-membership revenue shares per the conference's pro rata clause, because they joined as existing power-conference members. The prior four additions who joined this summer (BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF) will still have a two-year ramp-up to full-membership revenue under the extended media-rights deal in 2025, according to a Big 12 spokesperson.

There was one more alternate timeline that went unexplored. When Oregon and Washington committed to the Big Ten, the ACC scheduled a meeting for late Friday to discuss adding as many as all seven of the remaining Pac-12 universities, something Pac-12 leadership would have worked to facilitate, according to two conference sources familiar with the thought process. But the Big 12 struck first.

"Once Oregon and Washington decided to go to the Big Ten, the (Pac-12) was no longer viable," Crow said on Saturday. "You can't be in a non-viable position for more than a few hours in our minds, so we resolved that."

Severed rivalries. Ballooning travel demands. Conferences gerrymandered beyond recognition. And a league with 108 years of history - the home of the Rose Bowl, the self-dubbed Conference of Champions - undone over the course of 13 months by leadership missteps, a chastening dose of media-market reality, and by the folks who brought you "Ted Lasso."

"This conference has mismanaged itself on a bunch of different levels. And when you have poor leadership, one of the outcomes is failure," Washington State athletic director Pat Chun told reporters Wednesday. "That's what has happened to the Pac-12."

Stanford at USC. Texas Tech at Texas. The Apple Cup. Oregon State at Oregon. Bedlam.

This fall likely will be the last time each of those rivalries is played for the foreseeable future. For every renewed matchup - Texas vs. Texas A&M, Utah vs. BYU - another couple are lost. Officials from Washington and Oregon pledged to preserve their intrastate contests with the former Pac-12 members last week, but time will tell.

Asked by The Oregonian about Oregon's vow to prioritize future competition with Oregon State across all sports, Oregon State athletic director Scott Barnes expressed his doubts, stating: "To be determined."

If history is any indication, the conference shuffling isn't quite done, either. Ripple effects of the Pac-12's plunge are just now starting to spread, with Cal, Stanford, Oregon State and Washington State wandering the realignment desert. The ACC continues to explore the possibility of adding Stanford and Cal, as well as potentially SMU - after the Mustangs had been a Pac-12 target in recent months - though there is significant pushback to the idea within the conference. If they can't land ACC invites, Stanford and Cal might be forced to drop from the ranks of the Power 5, to the Mountain West or the American Athletic Conference.

While SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said Tuesday that his conference - whose bombshell addition of Oklahoma and Texas in the summer of 2021 set all this in motion - is "not actively recruiting" other institutions, he also called for the College Football Playoff to reconsider its format to pave the way for more at-large berths now that one of the 10 FBS leagues appears headed for extinction.

And never to be outdone, Florida State continues its saber rattling about escaping the ACC's purgatorial grant of rights, positioning itself for an inevitable Super Conference To Be Named Later.

How and when remains to be seen.