Canzano: Pac-12's next expansion move must be focused

Mountain West set to keep UNLV and Air Force... what's next?

The Pac-12 is a seven-member conference. (Photo: Rio Giancarlo)

Decide for yourself what lengths you’d go to for survival when faced with an existential crisis. The Mountain West decided to throw a bag of cash at UNLV and Air Force to save itself.

The two schools reportedly made a commitment to the Mountain West late on Wednesday night. The seven remaining MW schools are expected to sign a binding agreement on Thursday. I don’t blame anyone who wants to wait to see it in writing. But that’s where things sit.

Give Gloria Nevarez credit for her quick thinking. A lot of people would have seen all that smoke billowing down the hallways of her burning conference and hustled to the nearest fire exit. Instead, the MW commissioner crawled to her desk, found the keys to a forklift, and then used it to haul a pallet stacked with $100 bills back into the place, smothering the flames with Benjamins.

The Pac-12’s next move?

It needs to gather itself and make better, more focused, strategic moves. The Pac-12 should digest the five schools it took from the Mountain West and remind people that if it wanted UNLV and Air Force that badly, it probably would have taken them two weeks ago with that first expansion bite.

Then, the Pac-12 needs to go to market with its media rights — yes, with only seven schools — and get some real numbers. It also needs to think hard about how basketball fits in this new version of the conference.

The Mountain West has seven football teams. It still needs two full-time members to reach the NCAA minimum of eight schools. The Pac-12, with seven schools currently committed, might be tempted to go on offense today and make another half-baked offer. The smarter move is a ‘time-out’ and a shift in thinking.

Remember how the Big Ten played this same conference expansion game?

It blindsided the Pac-12 by taking USC and UCLA in the summer of 2022. Commissioner George Kliavkoff was in his car, in the middle of nowhere, driving from Montana to Idaho, when the news broke. He had no cell service. It was like a CIA operation. It took the poor guy 25 minutes to find a telephone signal and contact his panicked board.

The Big Ten’s media deal with FOX included escalators for the addition of new schools. Kevin Warren’s conference let the dust settle, let the Pac-12 toil in the market, and then snatched up Oregon and Washington 13 months later. The new-world Pac-12 doesn’t have that kind of time, but it does have the blueprint.

The Pac-12 made a very public run at Memphis, Tulane, and South Florida on Monday. The pitch now looks half-hearted, doesn’t it? It wasn’t a killer financial offer. It included minimal help with exit fees and allowed Commissioner Tim Pernetti time to react. Given that, he was able to outflank the Pac-12.

I’m told by sources that the six-member Pac-12 wasn’t unanimous in believing that looking eastward was the best expansion strategy. There was at least one dissenting vote in the room. The conference’s offer may have been influenced by that fact. Because those three prospective schools mulled the Pac-12’s terms, decided it wasn’t good enough, and publicly pledged solidarity with the American Athletic Conference.

Getting UNLV and/or Air Force was one of the Pac-12’s handful of contingency plans. But at what price? The conference jumped into discussions with the schools despite passing them over when it took Boise State, San Diego State, Colorado State, and Fresno State. The Pac-12 also grabbed Utah State, which was already packed and had its hand raised. The Aggies also had the No. 5-ranked TV viewership in the Mountain West. But when it came to this week’s ultimate moment of truth with UNLV and Air Force, the Pac-12 lost out.

It looks like the conference whiffed twice, doesn’t it?

Two strategic blunders?

Or did the Pac-12 just sort of like — and not love — those last two MW schools? It doesn’t take a forensic accountant to recognize that the Pac-12 had enough in the war chest to engage in a bidding war if it wanted that. It got the fifth-best school in the Mountain West, Utah State, at an acceptable number, but it didn’t appear willing to overpay for what it viewed as the sixth and seventh-best schools.

Still, the optics aren’t great. One retired long-time conference commissioner texted me a note on Thursday morning with advice for the Pac-12’s Teresa Gould: “Commissioner 101 — don’t extend a membership invite unless you are guaranteed the answer is ‘yes.’”

Gould’s conference is trying to build the No. 5 conference in college football. The Pac-12 thinks that kind of league could frequently put its champion in the College Football Playoff with an automatic berth. It also hopes to negotiate larger playoff distributions for members with the growing leverage.

There are forces out there working against all that. I’m sure the “Power 4” conferences were highly entertained this week, watching the villagers turn on each other and fight over a modest patch of turf outside the castle walls.

Everyone knows the Mountain West and Pac-12 are angry with each other. Their football scheduling negotiations broke down. The Pac-12 got pissed and decided to take the best MW schools. Then, the Pac-12 filed a complaint in court over the legality of what would be $55 million in ‘poaching penalties.” And — get this — the Mountain West is furious that some of the members it lost sat in on confidential strategy sessions days before they bolted to the Pac-12.

“We had a mole in the room,” one Mountain West source told me this week.

Mountain West Commissoner Gloria Nevarez. (Photo: Joseph Dycus)

Things are raw. And Nevarez, who played basketball at UMass, is a competitor. Losing the top section of her conference didn’t sit well. I wondered late Wednesday night as the news broke if Nevarez had enough, did some back-of-the-napkin math on the fees she expects to receive, and backed the truck up to ensure she didn’t become Kliavkoff 2.0.

The Pac-12 shook its head. Some administrators in the conference wonder if Nevarez will have the funds to make good on the financial promises to her members. People do what they do in a crisis. She made the play she thought she had to make. And it may end up being smart.

Tens of millions in bonuses?!?

Will that turn out to be true?!?

Heck, Stanford and Cal might have listened.

Jokes aside, the Pac-12’s biggest enemy isn’t the Mountain West. That needs to be put in print. The two conferences find themselves in similar circumstances and share a survival goal in the Darwinian world of college realignment.

The most glaring and pressing issue for the new-world Pac-12 is that it doesn’t have a concrete media rights deal to sell to prospective schools. It’s the same anvil that dragged the conference down before Oregon and Washington bolted to the Big Ten and the ‘Four Corners’ schools ran for the hills.

Navigate, the Pac-12’s consulting firm, provided valuations, revenue estimates, and data on the media rights front. The numbers were held up as ‘gospel’ by one side and waved off as ‘spreadsheet fiction’ by the other. I asked some independent consultants for their thoughts. They provided off-the-cuff ballpark estimates, but as one cautioned me: “You never really know the numbers until you go to market.”

Everyone out there is using educated guesses, media included.

The Pac-12 needs real numbers.

So do what the Big Ten did. Negotiate a media deal for your current membership and ask the prospective TV partners to include escalators for select additions. Ignore the noise. Wave off the naysayers who don’t understand the mission. Pull the circle of seven schools into a tight circle. Operate from a position of strength, not desperation. Get your value on paper, and then shop for the final members.

Maybe this new-world Pac-12 will discover it can afford to pay a larger chunk of the exit fees for schools in the AAC or somewhere else. Or maybe it will realize there’s a better chess move. Maybe one involving a football-only addition or two (UConn? Someone else?) along with a handful of basketball schools (Gonzaga? Saint Mary’s? Grand Canyon University?). The Pac-12 needs to stop stabbing in the dark and get some input from real TV partners.

UNLV is off the board?

Air Force, too?

A well-placed Pac-12 source told me before the news broke on Wednesday night: “This might sound crazy, but we don’t need either one of them.”

Time to go prove it.

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