Canzano: Pac-12's leadership comes from the bench
Pac-12’s flip-flop act is another whiff.
The lack of leadership in the Pac-12 Conference was on display this week. A small-town courtroom setting in rural Washington provided the perfect sand box, too. The place was plenty big enough for all the small-time thinking the conference has been doing.
George Kliavkoff, paid $3.6 million this year to serve as commissioner, was a no-show. He was in Montana, presumably absent on the advice of outside counsel. According to a letter Kliavkoff sent to Washington State and Oregon State — he doesn’t have a dog in the fight.
“Neither the Conference nor I have a position with respect to the proper composition of the Pac-12 Board,” he wrote in the letter first obtained by The San Jose Mercury News.
The conference office itself is in a complex position. It will take some careful thought to navigate the football and basketball season. But as Don Draper once said: “That’s what the money is for!”
There are matters of governance and operations in the next six to nine months that pertain to all 12 schools. There are some longer term issues that are definitely only of concern to OSU and WSU. And as one conference staff member told me: “There’s also a third bucket of disputed issues.”
What’s not disputed is how much of a bureaucrat Kliavkoff looks like right now.