CU and the Big 12, college football divorcees, together again? At Christmas, Brock Huard chuckled. OK, dude. Whatever.
At Valentine’s Day, he tittered. (Again?) At St. Patrick’s Day, he guffawed. (We’re still talking about this?)
On Memorial Day Weekend, the FOX Sports football analyst and former Washington Huskies QB isn’t laughing at the notion of the Buffs going east anymore.
“I would think, if you’re (athletic director) Rick George and you’re the Board of Regents, you’re the decision-makers, you’re going to try to find strength in numbers,” Huard told me late last week. “My hunch is that if you’re CU and your (football) program has been largely down for 20 years, you know what you want? Strength in numbers. And an aggressive (conference) commissioner who got a (broadcast) deal done, will not settle for ‘no,’ and does not, unfortunately, does not have a massive pit left by Larry Scott’s leadership that they’re trying to dig out of.”
The Pac-12 needs CU right now, not the other way around. The Buffs are the hottest 1-11 program in college football. They sold 11,273 single-game tickets this past Wednesday alone, the largest 24-hour sum in university history. Nosebleeds for the home opener against Nebraska’s Big Red Bugeaters on Sept. 9 start at around $400. CSU at Folsom Field on Sept. 16? You’re looking at $220 for the cheap seats.
Meanwhile, Pac-12 schools now apparently owe Comcast $50 million thanks to Luxury Larry Scott’s School of Wacky Accounting. And Washington State turned the clock back to the COVID-19 pandemic last week, dramatically slashing the Cougs’ budgets. As for broadcast rights after 2024? In the words of Chip Diller in the movie “Animal House,” remain calm, all is well! (Also, no deal yet.)
“(With) the kind of numbers I’ve heard, now all of a sudden, (the Buffs) can stick out their chests a little bit more,” Huard continued. “I think there’s probably a little more wind in their sails with some of the revenue generated (with Deion Sanders’ arrival). ‘Now you’re going to tell me we’re going to get less of a (broadcasting) share than Washington or Oregon or Stanford? We’re going to look out for ourselves.’ And that’s where college athletics, much to my chagrin, has gone. On every level.”
The Buffs can do better, and it feels as if months of back-room bartering, with June 30’s fiscal-year deadline closing fast, are starting to bubble up to the public sphere. When the bigwigs in Boulder say they don’t want to leave, they mean it. CU always wore a tie-dyed shirt underneath a Big Eight letterman jacket, an avocado campus in a brisket league.
But the Pac-12 remains a clown show under new management. Member schools owe Comcast a massive refund because of overpayments from 2012-2016. More blood in the water came last week via Wazzu president Kirk Schulz, who announced a hiring freeze and a pause on non-essential travel, purchases and new personnel development, citing the Comcast issue and the costs of moving the league’s HQ out of downtown San Francisco.
Buffs Chancellor Phil DiStefano, ever the good soldier, reiterated the company line to USA Today late last month, stressing that CU was “committed to the Pac-12,” while offering a soft caveat that the Buffs aren’t “going to even think about going anywhere, none of us, until we see what kind of offer we get, and that’s still being worked out.”
Four weeks later, those caveats are getting a little … harder.
“In a perfect world, we’d love to be in the Pac-12,” AD Rick George told Buffzone.com. “But we also have to do what’s right for Colorado at the end of the day.”
That chuckling sound you heard in the distance was Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark, check in hand.
Under its new deal with ESPN and FOX Sports, the Big 12’s expected to dish out at least $31.7 million in broadcast revenue annually to each of its universities starting on July 1, 2025, when a six-year extension kicks in.
An industry source told me he thinks the Pac-12’s new TV/streaming deal will inevitably land below that $31.7 million — the question is by how much. Another source thinks new Pac-12 commish George Kliavkoff’s distributions per school should fall in the $28 million to $31 million range.
“If it’s within $5 million (of the Big 12),” a source said, “I don’t think CU moves.”
That’s one kink. Another is the expansion pro rata clause in ESPN’s portion of the Big 12’s contract. In simplest terms, if Yormark expands by snatching up another Power 5-level program, the Worldwide Leader has to increase its payouts accordingly. Of the $31.7 million paid out per school, ESPN is fronting $20 million of that, or $240 million total, with FOX chipping in $140 million, for $380 million altogether.
“Go to Waco, go to Stillwater, go to Ames, you have pretty dynamic (environments) there, there’s not the apathy that you unfortunately find on the West Coast,” Huard said. “In Pac-12 markets, (companies) like the one I work for and ESPN say, ‘You don’t care. You don’t care.’ And these (Big 12) places at least have that going for them.”
Huard attended the Fiesta Summit in Scottsdale, Ariz., earlier this month, in which a number of conference administrators and athletic directors met with their peers and broadcast partners to talk shop. He hit a Big 12 function and a Pac-12 shindig on back-to-back days and after 48 hours of schmoozing, came away with some wildly divergent vibes.
“They could not have been more different,” Huard recalled. “One (Pac-12) AD told me, ‘I think we’re close to a deal … it’s got to get over the finish line, but it’s not there yet.’ And the next night, the Big 12 was pretty (darn) celebratory, where obviously they have their TV deal in place. (They’re) very assertive, very confident. The (contrast), I’m not going to say it was night and day, but it was very, very different.”
The Pac-12 keeps kicking the can on the expansion front, even though they’re running out of road. USC and UCLA are out the door after June 30, 2024. San Diego State has been widely targeted as a replacement, but the Mountain West’s exit fee jumps from $17 million to a reported $34 million on July 1.
“Like The Lumineers’ lyric, ‘Nobody knows how the story ends,’” Huard said. “And everyone right now is protecting their own self-interest.”
And the longer this Big 12 smoke sticks around, the more likely it looks that somebody’s about to get burned. Badly.