Your last answer reflects what is making me *really* reconsider my Saturday viewing habits going forward. The SEC is good football but it’s jingoistic, bandwagon-inducing brands are kind of nauseating. They’re mostly football teams that happen to have a college on campus. It’s...not what college football feels like to me. As for the Big Ten, their football isn’t even all that good overall. OSU and Michigan are nearly always at the top and it gets old, as the rest of the teams are pretty meh. Just feels like they’re flexing their viewership. The whole SEC-Big Ten power play feels dirty to me when we’re, in the end, talking about NCAA sports.
Oh, and this all ends badly for the athletes, in general, and those in non-football sports, in particular.
As I’ve often mentioned, if I want to watch football or basketball where it’s all about the money, I’ll watch the NFL and NBA. The quality is orders of magnitude higher, and I don’t have to watch Herbstreit and Corso yak on about Alabama or whatever their SEC Flavor of the Week is.
Oh, I'm certain it's not good for *any* NCAA sport. When you have naked power plays by media companies that dangle millions more dollars in front of athletic departments, it kind of ceases to be about the sport any longer, yeah? So, if it's *literally* just about the money (but not really because it's college - wink wink), I'll watch professional sports instead. At least there I *know* it's all about the money.
The worst part is that, in the grand scheme, it really isn't *that* much money for these universities. I mean, USC alone has an annual budget of about $6.5B. You're gonna tell me that an extra ~$30M is really that big of a deal for them? Hell, for Oregon it's not even all that big of a deal! So, these two schools are departing the PAC-12 for what amounts to about 0.5% of their annual budgets. They saw an 8-figure pay day and figured they were golden but their budgets are well into 10 figures, so it's just...not that much money in the end.
Even if you ignore the money - bear with me - the logistics of these moves are just awful. For football, they're bad. For non-football sports, they're *terrible*. Getting from LAX to SFO, SEA, PHX, SLC, or DEN is easy peasy. Getting to Tucson, EUG, and Pullman is a touch harder but still pretty easy. PAC-12 travel was a 4-5 hour affair, tops. But now you get to travel from LAX to the Midwest or East Coast, where your *closest* away game is in Lincoln. Their *best* travel days will be to Minnesota (MSP), Northwestern (ORD), or Wisconsin (MSN), as those are close to airports with non-stops to LAX and the flights only about 3.5 hours. It's a little longer to get to Michigan (DTW) or Ohio State (CMH) - about 4.5 hours - though the latter only has a single airline (Spirit) that goes non-stop to LAX. Detroit has multiple non-stops to LAX.
Beyond these, though, all travel days are a minimum of 5 hours, often requiring 2 flights or, at the very least, a long bus ride and 1 flight; and the travel days are more like 7-8 hours. Getting from LAX to DC and Newark means non-stops that are 5 to 6 hours. State College (Penn State), Bloomington (Indiana), Iowa City (Iowa), Champaign (Illinois), East Lansing (Mich St.), Lincoln (Nebraska), or West Lafayette (Purdue) are much messier. Purdue and Bloomington are both roughly a 1-hr ride to IND, which has a couple of non-stops to LAX (~4 hrs). You have to travel 30 minutes from Iowa City to CID (Cedar Rapids) to get a 1-stop to LAX (5-7 hrs). State College is a 1-stop to LAX (~6-8 hrs). East Lansing is 20 minutes from LAN, which has 1-stops to LAX (6-9 hrs). Champaign has 1-stops to LAX (6-7 hrs). Lincoln has 1-stops to LAX (5-8 hrs).
So, bare minimum, you've at least doubled your travel times in either direction, often tripling them. Like it or not, playing in the PAC-12 is convenient. The longest flight is SEA-LAX and that's only 3 hrs non-stop.
Fortunately for USC non-football teams once in the Big Ten they will not be flying commercial airlines. USC already uses charter air for football and basketball. This will be expanded to all teams using a fraction of the additional $40 million it will be getting its first year in the Big Ten. I wouldn't be surprised if USC enters into a long term lease for a midsized aircraft - a retired airplane leasing company executive post online "Depends on their age, and maintenance condition, and demand at the time. But broadly speaking, a 737–800 on operating lease would cost in the range of $150–$350k per month. A 767 at around $100k-250/300k per month." A $4 million a year travel budget will buy USC a lot of charter/leased aircraft. I've flown on both and its the best way to move a group to some of the smaller destinations in the Big Ten - all would be direct flights and no stops.
Also I'm on my company's quick incident response team and we fly from California to the east coast a couple times a year on charter aircraft. An eight to ten passenger jet, with all our gear for a 4 1/2 hour flight, then return a few days later is around $40,000 total cost. What I discovered a few years ago that was interesting is the crew (usually just a pilot and copilot) and airplane will just stay on the east coast with us until we're ready to leave... if the weather is good they'll spend their waiting days on the various golf courses in the area.
Disclaimer: I’m the progeny of an airline pilot (NWA) and the brother of one (DAL), and spent 12 years in the aviation industry as a CFI. I’m not coming at this naïve.
Chartering saves you time at the expense of $, so right there you’re eroding your media gains. At $4M/yr - which, given the number of flights, sounds really low at today’s fuel costs (please post a link so we can see the details - I can’t imagine this is fixed cost) - you’re taking a chunk out of those revenues. A football team will require at least 100 seats, and you wouldn’t use those for smaller teams (and there are many). If you have to charter half your flights, that’s expensive.
Even if you ignore costs, cross-country travel in the USA is exhausting. My family did it for 12 years in FL - my family lives in MN but my wife’s in OR. It just hurts and takes a couple of days to adjust. For student-athletes that have school obligations, that can be really disruptive. Cross-country flights are 5-6 hours on modern jets, whereas LAX (or Long Beach/Van Nuys) to places like SEA/BFI are maybe 2.5-3. When I was at CU, they used a turboprop charter aircraft to get to places like KU. Good for short distances but wouldn’t make it across the country.
So, while I’m sure they can afford it, how they do so begins to erode those sweet dollars, and the non-monetary costs are real.
...and if you take this line of thinking through to UO or UW, the logistics are FAR worse. At least LAX is a major destination for just about any decent-sized airport in the USA. SEA is less so, but still pretty decent in terms of accessibility.
But EUG? Oh. My. God. I just searched for a 8/26-8/27 roundtrip from EUG to State College, PA. The *best* itinerary I could find leaves EUG at about 0530, connects *twice* (DEN, ORD), and gets there in about 9 hours. The rest are 13-14 hours.
UO should run screaming from any mention of the Big Ten.
John, you're hitting a bullseye here for us locals leaning into every angle on this Pac-12 story. You're well positioned to offer currency and interesting back-line conversations that give us context. I'm even seeing your newsletter getting national posting and attention. If you're not careful, you're going to end up working for the Pac-Whatever!
I love what I'm doing here. Having fun with it. There's a shortage of sourced, in-depth reporting and commentary. Happy to help... in part, because it's my jobs, but also, because I care deeply myself. Thanks for reading.
Until the money is controlled college football will be an unbalanced monster. At some point HS kids will have to declare for college football so all the blue chips don’t end up at Alabama. Or some other craziness because you could put together a booster package and dump a huge amount of money in a HS kid or portal transfer kid. It’s gonna get real messy soon. 19 year old kid getting $5 million in booster funds to go to Alabama or some other monster. We are already seeing private HS offer kids free room and board with boosters paying school fees.
Some sort of knee jerk reaction will happen at some point and over correct.
Many media types are obviously running out of material, I read the same over and over. Why do reporters keep noting number of TV households Obviously population matters. But I NEVER see any meat/details concerning market demographics. Example, Orlando showsas #17 or so market vs Portland as 21. I am a Husky fan but that is comically incomplete info. If you consider median income, age, education etc. the picture becomes VERY different. Why does WSU have MANY more viewers for its games (on a per game basis) than the Arizona schools? There are good reasons for this but just because media seems to ignore those factors doesn't mean they are not a big deal to networks.
I think nothing is more over rated that the size of conferences. A rvised PAC with Washington, Oregon, Bay area Utah and even one other would provide an eight team slate three top 20 markets and a demographic vastly better than a lot of the Big 12. And an eight team slate could easily enter into firm contract with ACC for 8-12 games per year without screwing around with merging (at hugely added cost). Also ESPN would have a manageable small sized package to fill its needs. A 4450 million per year deal for 8-10 teams would provide manageable revenue with a little programming left over for added streaming etc.
PS I kow Phil Knight is the best owner in CFB but a lot of his influence epitomizes what is wrong with CFB now.
Newsome’s petulance probably stems more from being left out of an opportunity to get his name in the headlines and milk the decision for political gain than anything else. Notice that he wasn’t saying anybody at UCLA broke any rules or laws, and that he didn’t step in moments after it was announced and put it on hold. Also nobody at UCLA has been fired or suspended. Therefore it’s pretty obvious they acted within their authority, and that there will be no reversing course. No good ever comes from politicians being involved in collegiate sports.
Pigs is kind of a strong word, but I get where you're going. We're seeing something similar to what happened to Major League Baseball in the fifties. Up to that point, the PCL was considered the third major league. Baseball knew California was the future, poached LA and San Francisco, and a decade later we saw the result.
Same thing seems to be happening here. It took fifteen years for the Pilots to arrive in Seattle. Might take that long for Big Ten expansion here.
In the meantime, the Pac-10 has a tremendous opportunity to build an alternative.
The ACC's TV markets are waaaaay over-rated. Syracuse does NOT capture NY City. UVA and VT do NOT capture Wash DC. And GT is in Atlanta but it is overwhelmingly a UGA Bulldog town.
You're talking about the distinction between "viewership" and "market"... the ACC and Big Ten both get NY... one from Syracuse and the other, Rutgers. Atlanta market goes to the SEC (Georgia) and ACC (Georgia Tech). I cover some of that here: https://www.johncanzano.com/p/canzano-mailbag-deals-with-pac-12s-d11
Oregon is not in good position to join the Big Ten. They will only join if the Big Ten expands to 24 teams. Also, there’s no way the UC regents would stop UCLA so that both of their schools would be left out of the Big Ten. It doesn’t make sense. The Big Ten specifically wanted UCLA and USC because they are global household brands with billions of dollars in research funding. The best way for the UC regents to please Berkeley would be for UCLA to use their position in the Big Ten to admit Berkeley. Berkeley, Stanford, and Washington fit the Big Ten profile just fine but the same cannot be said for Oregon. Oregon has traditionally been grouped alongside Oregon State and Washington State as lower tiered schools in the Pac-12 from small rural markets.
John, regarding Hawaii, what about if the Pac 12 added them for Football only? The PAC 12 wouldn't have to dish them out a full share, plus each pac 12 team that travels to Hawaii would be allowed to add an extra game to their schedule thanks to the NCAA rule. Also, Hawaii just got approval from the Governor for $400 million for the new Aloha stadium? Would that make them more enticing considering the PAC 12 as a whole are themselves a geographically isolated conference?
Thanks, John for another great read. Going forward, anything can happen and probably will. I'm looking forward to reading that the Pac 12 is in good shape.
Your last answer reflects what is making me *really* reconsider my Saturday viewing habits going forward. The SEC is good football but it’s jingoistic, bandwagon-inducing brands are kind of nauseating. They’re mostly football teams that happen to have a college on campus. It’s...not what college football feels like to me. As for the Big Ten, their football isn’t even all that good overall. OSU and Michigan are nearly always at the top and it gets old, as the rest of the teams are pretty meh. Just feels like they’re flexing their viewership. The whole SEC-Big Ten power play feels dirty to me when we’re, in the end, talking about NCAA sports.
Oh, and this all ends badly for the athletes, in general, and those in non-football sports, in particular.
As I’ve often mentioned, if I want to watch football or basketball where it’s all about the money, I’ll watch the NFL and NBA. The quality is orders of magnitude higher, and I don’t have to watch Herbstreit and Corso yak on about Alabama or whatever their SEC Flavor of the Week is.
I worry about where this is headed. It may not be great for the sport.
Oh, I'm certain it's not good for *any* NCAA sport. When you have naked power plays by media companies that dangle millions more dollars in front of athletic departments, it kind of ceases to be about the sport any longer, yeah? So, if it's *literally* just about the money (but not really because it's college - wink wink), I'll watch professional sports instead. At least there I *know* it's all about the money.
The worst part is that, in the grand scheme, it really isn't *that* much money for these universities. I mean, USC alone has an annual budget of about $6.5B. You're gonna tell me that an extra ~$30M is really that big of a deal for them? Hell, for Oregon it's not even all that big of a deal! So, these two schools are departing the PAC-12 for what amounts to about 0.5% of their annual budgets. They saw an 8-figure pay day and figured they were golden but their budgets are well into 10 figures, so it's just...not that much money in the end.
Even if you ignore the money - bear with me - the logistics of these moves are just awful. For football, they're bad. For non-football sports, they're *terrible*. Getting from LAX to SFO, SEA, PHX, SLC, or DEN is easy peasy. Getting to Tucson, EUG, and Pullman is a touch harder but still pretty easy. PAC-12 travel was a 4-5 hour affair, tops. But now you get to travel from LAX to the Midwest or East Coast, where your *closest* away game is in Lincoln. Their *best* travel days will be to Minnesota (MSP), Northwestern (ORD), or Wisconsin (MSN), as those are close to airports with non-stops to LAX and the flights only about 3.5 hours. It's a little longer to get to Michigan (DTW) or Ohio State (CMH) - about 4.5 hours - though the latter only has a single airline (Spirit) that goes non-stop to LAX. Detroit has multiple non-stops to LAX.
Beyond these, though, all travel days are a minimum of 5 hours, often requiring 2 flights or, at the very least, a long bus ride and 1 flight; and the travel days are more like 7-8 hours. Getting from LAX to DC and Newark means non-stops that are 5 to 6 hours. State College (Penn State), Bloomington (Indiana), Iowa City (Iowa), Champaign (Illinois), East Lansing (Mich St.), Lincoln (Nebraska), or West Lafayette (Purdue) are much messier. Purdue and Bloomington are both roughly a 1-hr ride to IND, which has a couple of non-stops to LAX (~4 hrs). You have to travel 30 minutes from Iowa City to CID (Cedar Rapids) to get a 1-stop to LAX (5-7 hrs). State College is a 1-stop to LAX (~6-8 hrs). East Lansing is 20 minutes from LAN, which has 1-stops to LAX (6-9 hrs). Champaign has 1-stops to LAX (6-7 hrs). Lincoln has 1-stops to LAX (5-8 hrs).
So, bare minimum, you've at least doubled your travel times in either direction, often tripling them. Like it or not, playing in the PAC-12 is convenient. The longest flight is SEA-LAX and that's only 3 hrs non-stop.
Someone isn't thinking this through.
Excellent comment. Money grubbing Big Ten short sightedness. When everything was in balance before.
Fortunately for USC non-football teams once in the Big Ten they will not be flying commercial airlines. USC already uses charter air for football and basketball. This will be expanded to all teams using a fraction of the additional $40 million it will be getting its first year in the Big Ten. I wouldn't be surprised if USC enters into a long term lease for a midsized aircraft - a retired airplane leasing company executive post online "Depends on their age, and maintenance condition, and demand at the time. But broadly speaking, a 737–800 on operating lease would cost in the range of $150–$350k per month. A 767 at around $100k-250/300k per month." A $4 million a year travel budget will buy USC a lot of charter/leased aircraft. I've flown on both and its the best way to move a group to some of the smaller destinations in the Big Ten - all would be direct flights and no stops.
Also I'm on my company's quick incident response team and we fly from California to the east coast a couple times a year on charter aircraft. An eight to ten passenger jet, with all our gear for a 4 1/2 hour flight, then return a few days later is around $40,000 total cost. What I discovered a few years ago that was interesting is the crew (usually just a pilot and copilot) and airplane will just stay on the east coast with us until we're ready to leave... if the weather is good they'll spend their waiting days on the various golf courses in the area.
Disclaimer: I’m the progeny of an airline pilot (NWA) and the brother of one (DAL), and spent 12 years in the aviation industry as a CFI. I’m not coming at this naïve.
Chartering saves you time at the expense of $, so right there you’re eroding your media gains. At $4M/yr - which, given the number of flights, sounds really low at today’s fuel costs (please post a link so we can see the details - I can’t imagine this is fixed cost) - you’re taking a chunk out of those revenues. A football team will require at least 100 seats, and you wouldn’t use those for smaller teams (and there are many). If you have to charter half your flights, that’s expensive.
Even if you ignore costs, cross-country travel in the USA is exhausting. My family did it for 12 years in FL - my family lives in MN but my wife’s in OR. It just hurts and takes a couple of days to adjust. For student-athletes that have school obligations, that can be really disruptive. Cross-country flights are 5-6 hours on modern jets, whereas LAX (or Long Beach/Van Nuys) to places like SEA/BFI are maybe 2.5-3. When I was at CU, they used a turboprop charter aircraft to get to places like KU. Good for short distances but wouldn’t make it across the country.
So, while I’m sure they can afford it, how they do so begins to erode those sweet dollars, and the non-monetary costs are real.
...and if you take this line of thinking through to UO or UW, the logistics are FAR worse. At least LAX is a major destination for just about any decent-sized airport in the USA. SEA is less so, but still pretty decent in terms of accessibility.
But EUG? Oh. My. God. I just searched for a 8/26-8/27 roundtrip from EUG to State College, PA. The *best* itinerary I could find leaves EUG at about 0530, connects *twice* (DEN, ORD), and gets there in about 9 hours. The rest are 13-14 hours.
UO should run screaming from any mention of the Big Ten.
John, you're hitting a bullseye here for us locals leaning into every angle on this Pac-12 story. You're well positioned to offer currency and interesting back-line conversations that give us context. I'm even seeing your newsletter getting national posting and attention. If you're not careful, you're going to end up working for the Pac-Whatever!
I love what I'm doing here. Having fun with it. There's a shortage of sourced, in-depth reporting and commentary. Happy to help... in part, because it's my jobs, but also, because I care deeply myself. Thanks for reading.
Until the money is controlled college football will be an unbalanced monster. At some point HS kids will have to declare for college football so all the blue chips don’t end up at Alabama. Or some other craziness because you could put together a booster package and dump a huge amount of money in a HS kid or portal transfer kid. It’s gonna get real messy soon. 19 year old kid getting $5 million in booster funds to go to Alabama or some other monster. We are already seeing private HS offer kids free room and board with boosters paying school fees.
Some sort of knee jerk reaction will happen at some point and over correct.
Those two pigs!!!! Hahahahahaha!
Spot on!!! Love the crab boil story.
Their is joy on your writing. Did you Stewart Mandel’s piece in the Athletic regarding a PAC 12/ Big 12 merger ?
Many media types are obviously running out of material, I read the same over and over. Why do reporters keep noting number of TV households Obviously population matters. But I NEVER see any meat/details concerning market demographics. Example, Orlando showsas #17 or so market vs Portland as 21. I am a Husky fan but that is comically incomplete info. If you consider median income, age, education etc. the picture becomes VERY different. Why does WSU have MANY more viewers for its games (on a per game basis) than the Arizona schools? There are good reasons for this but just because media seems to ignore those factors doesn't mean they are not a big deal to networks.
I think nothing is more over rated that the size of conferences. A rvised PAC with Washington, Oregon, Bay area Utah and even one other would provide an eight team slate three top 20 markets and a demographic vastly better than a lot of the Big 12. And an eight team slate could easily enter into firm contract with ACC for 8-12 games per year without screwing around with merging (at hugely added cost). Also ESPN would have a manageable small sized package to fill its needs. A 4450 million per year deal for 8-10 teams would provide manageable revenue with a little programming left over for added streaming etc.
PS I kow Phil Knight is the best owner in CFB but a lot of his influence epitomizes what is wrong with CFB now.
WSU AND Ore State included
Bring in Boise, BYU and Fresno and destroy the other sold out leagues with toughness and respect
Newsome’s petulance probably stems more from being left out of an opportunity to get his name in the headlines and milk the decision for political gain than anything else. Notice that he wasn’t saying anybody at UCLA broke any rules or laws, and that he didn’t step in moments after it was announced and put it on hold. Also nobody at UCLA has been fired or suspended. Therefore it’s pretty obvious they acted within their authority, and that there will be no reversing course. No good ever comes from politicians being involved in collegiate sports.
Pigs is kind of a strong word, but I get where you're going. We're seeing something similar to what happened to Major League Baseball in the fifties. Up to that point, the PCL was considered the third major league. Baseball knew California was the future, poached LA and San Francisco, and a decade later we saw the result.
Same thing seems to be happening here. It took fifteen years for the Pilots to arrive in Seattle. Might take that long for Big Ten expansion here.
In the meantime, the Pac-10 has a tremendous opportunity to build an alternative.
I raised pigs as a kid. They're smart. Also, they're pigs.
The ACC's TV markets are waaaaay over-rated. Syracuse does NOT capture NY City. UVA and VT do NOT capture Wash DC. And GT is in Atlanta but it is overwhelmingly a UGA Bulldog town.
You're talking about the distinction between "viewership" and "market"... the ACC and Big Ten both get NY... one from Syracuse and the other, Rutgers. Atlanta market goes to the SEC (Georgia) and ACC (Georgia Tech). I cover some of that here: https://www.johncanzano.com/p/canzano-mailbag-deals-with-pac-12s-d11
Oregon is not in good position to join the Big Ten. They will only join if the Big Ten expands to 24 teams. Also, there’s no way the UC regents would stop UCLA so that both of their schools would be left out of the Big Ten. It doesn’t make sense. The Big Ten specifically wanted UCLA and USC because they are global household brands with billions of dollars in research funding. The best way for the UC regents to please Berkeley would be for UCLA to use their position in the Big Ten to admit Berkeley. Berkeley, Stanford, and Washington fit the Big Ten profile just fine but the same cannot be said for Oregon. Oregon has traditionally been grouped alongside Oregon State and Washington State as lower tiered schools in the Pac-12 from small rural markets.
John, regarding Hawaii, what about if the Pac 12 added them for Football only? The PAC 12 wouldn't have to dish them out a full share, plus each pac 12 team that travels to Hawaii would be allowed to add an extra game to their schedule thanks to the NCAA rule. Also, Hawaii just got approval from the Governor for $400 million for the new Aloha stadium? Would that make them more enticing considering the PAC 12 as a whole are themselves a geographically isolated conference?
Thanks, John for another great read. Going forward, anything can happen and probably will. I'm looking forward to reading that the Pac 12 is in good shape.
Love “The Relationship Building” ❤️😎
Great stuff as usual, John.
Please look into the latest on possible Autzen Stadium expansion. Things like capacity, cost and who pays for it. TY!
My question is. Wouldn’t be easier to try and keep USC and UCLA in conference. By making a counter offer?
Thanks again for your insight into college athletics while reminding us all of the importance of family!
Thanks Dave. We all lose sight. I am reminding myself as much as anyone.