Canzano: Actually... the Pac-12 was just fine

A private equity firm offered $1 billion to the conference in 2019.

The Pac-12 Network will go dark after next Friday’s baseball broadcast. (Photo: Darby Winter)

Late in the 2018 Pac-12 football season, Commissioner Larry Scott met with the media before the conference championship game at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara.

Scott was on defense that day.

I’d published a multi-part series earlier that week outlining the missteps of his tenure. I’d reported that the Pac-12’s downtown San Francisco headquarters would cost the schools $92 million in rent over 11 years. That Scott’s lavish travel expenditures were out of line compared to the other power conferences. And that his $5.3 million-a-year paycheck wasn’t just the highest of all college commissioners, it was downright offensive given that his members were bleeding cash.

The Pac-12 was wobbling, even then. Rick Neuheisel, who had coached at UCLA earlier in the decade, told me he didn’t have enough money in his program to buy all his skill-position players gloves. Neuheisel had to pick and choose which position groups got them. When I pressed the commissioner about his double-dip salary and the bloated expenses, he pointed out that the Pac-12 wasn’t just an athletic conference.

“We’re actually a media company as well,” he said.

Actually?

Will you hold that thought?

I’ve always loved to read and write. As a kid, I devoured the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathanial Hawthorne, Shirley Jackson, Henry David Thoreau, Sylvia Plath, John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Ernest Hemingway. I studied English Literature in college and one of my professors — a white-haired man named Victor Lams — was persnickety and precise with language.

Lams was one of those people who could have been any age. He was somewhere between 50 and 80 years old when I sat in his classroom. Nobody knew. But he was stoic and matter-of-fact. He wore a Baker Boy hat to class and looked like a character from the TV show Peaky Blinders. His lectures were tense and could be awkward in pacing unless you understood his humor.

Victor Lams was a brutal grader, too. Long before I arrived on campus students nicknamed him “Silence of the Lams.” I secretly loved his feedback, though. He was the first teacher who didn’t just give me an “A” and pass me along. My first essay, penned in one of those small university blue books, received a grade of C+.

“Weak words,” he wrote in a margin.

Lams didn’t just use a red pen to correct mistakes, his preferred weapon was an X-ACTO knife. It had an aluminum handle and a razor blade at its tip. If you used a word or wrote a phrase that Lams didn’t like, he wouldn’t just circle it. He’d pick up the knife and surgically remove it from the blue book.

That first essay looked like Swiss cheese.

Lams removed every “actually” in the piece. He didn’t throw the scraps of paper away. He tossed them like confetti back into the blue book and left them for me. After class, the professor told me: “Just say it. What you are writing is either true or isn’t true. When you use ‘actually’ the reader will wonder if you even believe it.”

He was actually right.

Or, rather, he was right.

I doubt Larry Scott believed anything he was trying to sell to the media in 2018. A couple of weeks later, I found out that when Scott made that “actually” comment he was already shopping an investment in the Pac-12’s future media rights to private equity investors.

The “Pac-12 NewCo” plan was introduced by Scott to the Pac-12 CEO Group at their mid-November meeting in 2018. It was subsequently discussed in a conference call in December, per several presidents I spoke with.

Nine months later, Scott emerged and announced he did not have a deal. The commissioner said of his presidents and chancellors: “They don’t want to do something with a private equity or a financial firm.”

The Pac-12 was offered $1 billion for 15 percent equity in the conference by a private equity firm in early 2019, per sources. The biggest pushback came from two Pac-12 camps — USC and UCLA. I keep wondering, did the Trojans and Bruins know in 2018 that they were going… going… gone? Did Scott pick up on that and fear he would eventually lose the Los Angeles media market? If so, Scott didn’t warn his successor, George Kliavkoff. Even so, Kliavkoff should have asked around and picked up on that.

The Pac-12 has endured a lot of “lasts” since August. The last conference football championship game was played in December. The last men’s and women’s basketball tournaments came in March. And next week, the final conference baseball tournament and last Pac-12 Network broadcast.

Yes, I know. Oregon State and Washington State could theoretically rebuild. They could end up putting on future Pac-12 events. But you know what I mean. The 12-member conference fell off the wall like Humpty Dumpty. Maybe it will be put back together someday. Or maybe, we’re about to watch the entire college athletics ecosystem topple and be reconstructed.

I spoke with Teresa Gould, the Pac-12 commissioner, this week about shutting the lights off and moving on. She said: “I’m not going to lie — there's a lot of sadness. There’s a lot of heartbreak for our staff.”

The Pac-12 Network signal will go dark at midnight on June 30. The final live sports event aired by the network will be next Friday’s semifinals of the conference baseball tournament from Arizona. I’ll be there, reporting from the scene.

The commissioner told me she would be there alongside producers, directors, her staff, and the conference’s baseball teams. Gould said she’s made it a point to attend all the Pac-12’s “last” events.

108 years of history is officially about to evaporate like a puddle on the summer sidewalk. There were too many missteps and so much poor leadership. And I keep thinking about something Henry David Thoreau wrote once.

“Things do not change; we change.”

There were people involved in every blasted decision, after all.

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