Canzano: Coffee with the Pac-12 Commissioner
Media rights, expansion... and more.
SALEM — The small, red building at the corner of Liberty Road and Hansen Avenue operated as a service station in the 1950s. The gas pumps are long gone. The garage where mechanics used to hoist vehicles and make repairs now serves as the kitchen and dining room for the ACME Cafe.
“From Scratch American Cookery,” the sign in the front window reads.
I met Pac-12 Commissioner Teresa Gould here for breakfast on Saturday morning. She slipped into a quiet booth at the back of the restaurant. Her order: French toast and a side of bacon, “extra crispy.”
Later in the day, Gould would drive her dark blue four-door rental car sedan 40 miles south to Corvallis, where she’d watch Oregon State’s football team stun Washington State, 41-38, in classic “Pac-12 After Dark” fashion.
Saturday morning was a good time for a sit-down — columnist to commissioner, commissioner to columnist. There’s so much still up in the air for the Pac-12 and Gould is in the middle of it.
Gould has been on the job as commissioner for nine months. When she was promoted in February, one long-time conference staffer who had worked alongside Gould for years told me: “Teresa cares so much, I worry about the weight of what she’s taking on. If she can’t save the Pac-12, it’s going to leave a hole in her heart.”
I shared that with Gould on Saturday — her eyes got glassy.
“I still feel that weight,” she confessed.
The Pac-12 added Gonzaga, Boise State, San Diego State, Colorado State, Fresno State, and Utah State via expansion. It needs to add at least one more ‘all-sports’ school before the summer of 2026. The Pac-12 hired Octagon to help with its media rights negotiations.
“The legacy and brand of the Pac-12 are important to a lot of people,” she said.
What’s the timeline for media rights? Will the conference bundle (or split) its football and basketball inventory? What factors will drive the Pac-12’s next bite in expansion? The conference and its TV network once had 179 employees. It now employs 33 full-time staff between headquarters and Pac-12 Enterprises. Does it expect to rehire and grow again?
“Coffee,” Gould said to the server, “and please, keep it coming.”
Gould’s husband, Ron, is a football coach. He’s currently the running backs coach of the Los Angeles Rams. They have “date nights” amid their tight schedules. She added: “It helps to be married to someone who understands the demands of the business.”
At one point, Gould pulled out her phone to show me a picture her husband texted her this week. The photo was taken inside the Rams coaching offices and shows Ron posing alongside a smiling Steven Jackson. The former Oregon State star running back has emerged as an influential voice behind the scenes at his alma mater.
“Our worlds collide,” she said.
Gould immersed herself for a few days this week on campus in Corvallis. She attended a couple of sporting events and met with the athletic directors and staff of Washington State and Oregon State. At a women’s volleyball game between the Cougars and Beavers, Gould saw a fan wearing a “Pac-2” T-shirt. She walked over during a break in play, introduced herself, and offered to get the fan a “Pac-12” branded shirt.
“That’s my peeve,” she said, “we’re the Pac-12.”
On Friday night, the commissioner participated in the “band crawl” — an OSU football tradition in which the school band marches through downtown Corvallis and performs at local restaurants and bars.
Gould got her undergraduate degree at Iowa State. She understands college towns and enjoyed tagging along with the band. Between the conference calls, meetings, lawyers, and media obligations, the Friday outing was a reminder that her mission is rooted in the college experience.
Saturday morning, we met and talked about the Pac-12.
Some takeaways:
• Gould declined to put a firm timeline on the conference media-rights negotiations. (She’s learned from her predecessors, apparently.) Industry insiders tell me a reasonable target for an announcement would be sometime around basketball’s March Madness. Gould wants to manage expectations, but I didn’t hear anything on Saturday that shifted that estimate.
• The next Pac-12 expansion bite will be driven by feedback from media partners, per Gould. Will expansion come after a TV deal is signed? Before? During the negotiations? Said Gould: “I don’t think we need to get all the way to the end of the media-rights process.”
• Gould and her presidents have worked with Octagon for a few weeks. She said the process was in the “introductory stage” and indicated that the next phase — one she summarized as: “Who’s bidding?” — wasn’t far off.
• “We’re not just looking for whoever is willing to pay the most dollars for our rights,” Gould told me. “We’re looking for partnership. We need a media partner who wants to be part of our growth and what we’re doing to recreate the Pac-12.”
• The Pac-12 isn’t just shopping 2026-2031 football and basketball media rights, Gould reminded me. The conference has football inventory for the 2025 season, too. The CW carried 11 home OSU and WSU football games this season. FOX aired two other games. The CW and FOX have an exclusive negotiating window as part of the previous contract, per Gould.
• Should fans expect the same media company that lands the 2025 football rights to be in play for the Pac-12’s rights in 2026 and beyond? Gould nodded. Synergy and some fluidity between the two deals could be attractive to the Pac-12. “We have a story to tell,” she said. “You don’t ideally want to wait until 2026 to start telling it.”
• Why hire Octagon as the media consultant? A number of boutique-style consulting firms do great work, but the Pac-12 chose to go with a large, well-connected firm. Gould emphasized that Octagon has done a number of successful college media rights deals. Her predecessor, George Kliavkoff, hired Sports Media Advisors, a much smaller entity with less experience in the college space. It sounds like Gould is mindful of optics and intentionally steering away from the kind of moves that Kliavkoff and ex-commissioner Larry Scott made.
• Will the Pac-12 separate basketball from football in the sale of media rights? I’ve talked with a number of industry insiders who are curious about what the conference will do there, particularly because it now includes Gonzaga. I got the impression from Gould that the conference will shop the rights, at least initially, as a bundle. That could change if a media partner expresses an appetite for a basketball-only offering.
• Will the Pac-12 circle back and make membership offers to Tulane and Memphis? How about UNLV? Are the Rebels still on the table? Or will the Pac-12 go after someone else? Gould declined to comment, not surprisingly. What’s evident is that she’ll have concrete numbers to share with whoever the Pac-12 and its media partners target. When the Pac-12 added five top Mountain West schools and Gonzaga, all Gould had was a spreadsheet with projections.
• Will geography matter with Pac-12 expansion? I’ve been told there is some opposition from at least one of the eight members about the potential travel costs and logistics of expanding eastward.
“We want to be the ‘Best in the West,’” Gould told me. “No matter what, the conference’s core will always be rooted in the west.”
• Remove Sacramento State from the expansion board, despite the geography. Gould lives in Northern California, within an hour of the school. She knows the campus well and admires its recent ambition, but I didn’t get the impression that the Pac-12 has an interest in adding an FCS school.
• A few months before Gould was hired, the presidents in Corvallis and Pullman dispatched consultant Oliver Luck to study Pac-12 Enterprises. Was it a viable business? How lucrative could production for live sports events be to the Pac-12? Luck reported to WSU and OSU that he saw the potential for a viable business.
• Pac-12 Enterprises is humming, Gould said. The TV production arm of the operation is being run by Michael Molinari and is leasing 42,000 square feet of office space at Bishop Ranch in San Ramon, Calif.
It produced a line of college football games this season, a studio show on The CW, some NBC Sports Bay Area games for the Warriors, and other live events, including the WCC cross-country championships.
Per Gould, Pac-12 Enterprises is now doing work “for anyone and everyone.” That includes ESPN, per network sources. Gould said the conference needs to decide whether to dramatically expand the capacity of Pac-12’s production business and grow or simply stay lean and focus on doing 500 or so events a year. That question is TBD.
• Staffing increases coming soon at the Pac-12 offices? We’ll see. Gould said she aims to keep expenses lean for Oregon State and Washington State, but the demands grow as more schools are added. The conference is using independent contractors to handle some of the operational duties, per Gould.
Gould and I spoke candidly on a wide array of topics for 90 minutes. The Ohio State vs. Indiana football game was on television on the wall over her right shoulder. She turned at one point to see what was on the TV but didn’t seem interested in the game.
Her 109-year-old conference was a model of stability for decades. It now looks different. The loss of tradition is glaring. Rivalries have been threatened. The Pac-12 cities will soon include places such as Boise, San Diego, Fresno, and Spokane. Some of the biggest brands exited. A lot has gone right in the last few months for the Pac-12, but the rebuild remains an uphill climb.
Gould stood in the face of all that over multiple cups of coffee at ACME Cafe, insisting she was in the most worthwhile fight of her professional career.
“We have overwhelming support,” Gould said. “People view the Pac-12 as a legacy brand. Media partners, the community, and even alumni at some of the schools that left for other conferences come up to me and tell me they’re angry about what happened and want to see the Pac-12 thrive again.”
The commissioner sounded energized and focused.
Also, she shared a story. On Friday night, Gould was accompanied by Washington State AD Anne McCoy. They bumped into a die-hard WSU fan who is a friend of Cougar quarterback and school legend Jack “the Throwin’ Samoan” Thompson.
Gould and McCoy stopped to visit. The Cougar supporter made small talk and said, “Jack says the Pac-12 Commissioner is coming to the game.”
Gould smiled politely and nodded.
Another fan heard the exchange, broke in, and said: “Yes, she’s coming, you dummy — AND THIS IS HER!! She’s the Pac-12 commissioner!!”
Said Gould: “It was hilarious.”
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Duck fan here who witnessed the great Beavs/Cougars game last night. Really glad to see the Beavers win. I think we can all agree that the demise of the original PAC12 was a sad event. The pieces seem to be in place for the new incarnation to be successful. Here's wishing for the best.
I appreciate that the Commissioner is willing to get out and mingle with the fans. What a change from her predecessors.