The Pac-12 Had An Offer From ESPN Last Year For $30 Million Per School Annually And Didn't Take It Because They Thought They Could Do Better

John Canzano — The Pac-12 got an offer of $30 million per school from ESPN in the fall of 2022. It included all the conference’s media rights, including the Pac-12 Network. But the conference presidents and chancellors believed they could do much better. 

The board instructed Kliavkoff to reject ESPN’s proposal and make a lopsided counter-offer. The commissioner should have pushed back and managed expectations in the room. He should have been more tuned into the eroding media landscape. Kliavkoff followed the order and the consequences were grave.

Source to me: “You know what we told ESPN after their $30 million per-school offer?”

Me: “What?”

Source: “We said we want $50 million per school.”

Me: “What was the ESPN response?”

Source: “Goodbye.”

The downfall of the Pac-12 is going to make for a fascinating book in the near future. There may not be more than a handful of businesses run more poorly over the last decade in the country.

The Pac-12, now about to start its last year of existence, rejected an offer from ESPN last fall that would have given each school $30 million a year because the schools apparently thought they could get $50 million from somebody. Their best offer ended up being a streaming-only offer from Apple for only $25 million per school guaranteed — though that number could have theoretically gone up if the league somehow got an astronomical amount of people to sign up for the Pac-12 streaming service.

Former commissioner Larry Scott did a great job of running the Pac-12 into the ground for many years, but his successor George Kliavkoff did a pretty bang-up job himself of finishing it off. It sucks that it took the conference completely dissolving in a matter of days for those in the league office to apparently figure out what the Pac-12 was really worth without USC and UCLA, but anyone halfway tuned in to what was happening with realignment and the current media landscape could have told them to take that ESPN deal and run. Someone needed to sit Kliavkoff down and show him this video:

Instead, the schools with other options have exercised them and Cal, Stanford, Washington State and Oregon State are left to fend for themselves because of inept leadership and a horribly played game of chicken. I can't wait to read the behind-the-scenes book, though.