"Made poor decision with their own network": CFB analyst explains how Pac-12 media deal blunder led to USC, UCLA and others leaving the conference

With no Pac-12 media deal, the conference is on life support. Personalities from around the football world are trying to figure out what went wrong for the storied conference. The almost unanimous answer is that the conference authorities didn't know how to handle their media deals. This led to reduced revenues for every school, which is what led them to seek more profitable arrangements elsewhere.

On his show on Thursday, Klatt pointed out how the mishandling of the Pac-12 media deal affected member schools and created the incentive to leave.

He said:

"If you look at what happened over the last decade, you'll see that the Pac-12 made a poor decision with their own network. A lot of people have talked about this, where they didn't get the distribution that they needed. And because of that, the value and the revenue distribution was not there per school.

"When that happened, then the teams didn't get the revenue nor the exposure that they expected or needed. At that point, they've got to make a decision. Okay. And at that moment, there's a lot that had already gone on in college football, because remember, it's not just these moves that have happened."

UCLA was one of the first schools to announce it was leaving the Pac-12

Joe Klatt's complete analysis of the Pac-12 media deal situation

Joel Klatt analyzed the Pac-12 media deal situation from USC's and UCLA's announcements to the current state of affairs.

He opened his show on Thursday with a mention of how wild the off-season was and how the Pac-12 media deal situation ruined the conference's future:

"And that offseason was dominated by conference realignment. And so, let's recap and just make sure that we're all on the same page in terms of what went on and why it went on.

"These were the teams that ended up making the announcement that they will be moving conferences at the end of next year and into 2024: Washington and Oregon. They're gonna head to the Big Ten, while Arizona State, Arizona, Colorado and Utah, the four corner schools, if you will, are all headed to the Big 12. Now, let's take a look at how we got here. Why is this happening?"

He also gave his thoughts on why this was the current state of affairs:

"Everyone always just immediately blamed, 'Whoa, it's just the almighty dollar and greed and all this.' And well, yes and no, let's .. actually take a step further back and realize that the Pac-12, which all of these teams play in this year, and USC and UCLA who left a year ago ... made several decisions over the course of the last 10 and 12 years that led to their own demise.

"...so that lack of leadership in the conference ended up materializing into what we've seen over the course of the last two off-seasons. And in particular, late in this last off-season, in which all of these six schools are going to leave conferences."

Klatt also explained how the lack of a proper Pac-12 media deal affected USC and its aspirations:

"When OU and Texas went to the SEC, then teams like USC ... looked at the landscape and they thought to themselves, 'How are we going to compete at the top end unless we're in a conference which is going to afford us the same type of distribution that those schools are getting?' So they felt like they had to go to the Big Ten."

This domino effect was created initially by Texas and Oklahoma joining the SEC, which in turn led to schools all over the nation looking for the most profitable environment to be in.

In the end, it was the Big 12 and the Pac-12 that were left searching for a new media deal to strengthen their position. The Big 12 won that race, with a Pac-12 media deal with ESPN or Apple TV fumbled by the leadership, which finally spelled the end for the West Coast conference. The Big 12 did close a deal with ESPN.