Show Me the Money: Oregon bites, Oregon State bruised

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Some day soon, the dust will settle and we will learn the fate of the Pac-12.

Will the Atlantic Coast Conference’s rejection of Stanford and California hold and make it the Pac-4? Will they then stick together with Oregon State and Washington State and try to make something from the wildfire that gutted a Power Five conference in a year’s time?

Will Oregon State be among the Pac-12 schools that merge with the Mountain West? Or will it be part of a merger with the American Athletic Conference? Might the Beavers try to make it as independent?

There are enough possibilities to make a head swim. If you’re like me, you’ve read dozens of articles about the situation, and it’s difficult to know the veracity of the information.

“What I’ve learned is you can believe five percent of what’s out there,” says Kyle Bjornstad, a former Oregon State athletic administrator and co-founder of “Dam Nation” collective. “You just don’t know what is accurate.”

Kyle Bjornstand, co-founder and director of Oregon State’s “Dam Nation” collective, says Beaver Nation “will keep moving forward

I’ve spoken with about a dozen current and former OSU coaches and administrators over the past week, some of whom preferred to talk off the record. I also interviewed a sports economist and professor of economics at Linfield who had thoughts on the subject of Pac-12 realignment.

None of them know where Oregon State will wind up, but all of them have their opinions. They all share in one thought: Nobody likes what has happened to the conference. All of them wish it hadn’t.

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A notable line in film comes in “Jerry Maguire” when NFL star Cuba Gooding tells agent Tom Cruise, “Show me the money.” (the clip below is NSFW)

It offers a vision of what happened when the athletic directors at UCLA and Southern Cal, Martin Jarmond and Mike Bohn (since resigned), were approached about their schools’ potential membership in the Big Ten.

Forget the regional ties and rivalries of more than a century. No matter the travel costs and additional wear and tear on lives of their “student-athletes.” Sure. Where do we sign?

The Bruins and Trojans announced their departure last year, and then Colorado begged out for the Big 12. Oregon and Washington laid the death-knell blow by fleeing for the Big Ten, followed by Arizona, Arizona State and Utah joining Colorado as Big 12-bound in a mass exodus that has left the Pac-12 in shambles.

Missouri football coach Eli Drinkwitz got off a good line in the aftermath.

“I thought the transfer portal was closed,” he told reporters. “Oh, that’s just for the student-athletes. The adults in the room get to do whatever they want, apparently.”

How far the mighty have fallen. Think back to 2011, when Texas and Oklahoma were looking to leave the Big 12 and made overtures at the Pac-12.

“I was looking forward to that,” says Mike Riley, then Oregon State’s football coach. “Can you imagine having Texas come in to play a conference game in Corvallis?”

Commissioner Larry Scott opted not to go for expansion because the conference had set “a very high bar. It’s hard to imagine very many scenarios for our conference to expand because the bar is so high.”

The bar was so high, Scott was drinking Kool-Aid from it. And his successor, George Kliavkoff, was sipping some figurative highballs himself.

The Pac-12’s current agreement calls for each school to receive $21 million annually in media rights from deals with Fox and ESPN. In 2024-25, UCLA and Southern Cal will receive full Big Ten media rights payments in the neighborhood of $60 million apiece.

Kliavkoff clearly misled Pac-12 officials. On June 30, Pac-12 members set a July 31 deadline for the commissioner to finally present a media-rights deal that had been bargained for more than a year. At the conference media day in Las Vegas on July 21, Kliavkoff praised league members for their patience and said it would be rewarded with a hefty media-rights deal.

“I will tell you, what we’ve seen is the longer we wait for a media deal, the better our options get,” he said.

Or not. According to multiple sources, ESPN offered the Pac-12 $30 million per school in the fall of 2022. The conference representatives turned it down and counter-offered at $50 million. No deal was reached.

Kliavkoff had also talked about how excited he was to have Deion Sanders coaching in the conference. Guess he was caught by surprise when, on July 27, Colorado defected to the Big 12 before the commissioner had the chance to present any numbers to Pac-12 officials.

According to The Athletic, that caused ESPN to pull back on its negotiations with Kliavkoff because it now owed the Big 12 an agreed-upon pro-rate share for adding a power-conference program.

On August 1, Kliavkoff offered Pac-12 members a deal with Apple as its primary rights-holder for a rate starting at $23 million per school on a five-year contract, with incentives that could boost annual payouts into numbers competitive with Big 12 money. Going to a streaming service with no linear component, however, made the deal a tough sell to the Pac-12 brethren.

Any interest in doing a contract without a linear partner evaporated the next day when Oregon and Washington bailed.

“We were thinking, well, it’s going to be like selling candy bars for Little League, or Girl Scout cookies,” said Arizona president Robert Robbins. “You have to convince 3 to 5 million people every year to sign up for $100 a year to watch a streaming-only app.”

School executives had seen projections for revenue from the Pac-12 Networks fall short through the years. The solidarity of the Big Ten deal looked too good to pass on.

UCLA and Southern Cal will enter the Big Ten as full members, receiving somewhere between $60 and $70 million per year. Oregon and Washington join as partial media-rights members at an average annual rate in the low- to mid-$30 millions, with $1 million annual escalators until completion of a new deal with CBS, Fox and NBC. Fox came in with additional money to ensure that revenue distributions to current Big Ten schools were not diluted with the addition of UO and UW.

What amounts to a comedy of errors has led the once Pac-12 from proud to pantsed. And Oregon State’s administration grasping at straws for what to do next.

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Linfield sports economist Randy Grant says Oregon’s move to the Big Ten will make it more difficult for fans and family members to attend road games

Randy Grant has worked at Linfield for three decades and currently is a sports economist/chair of the economics department at the McMinnville school. He co-authored a book titled “the Economics of Intercollegiate Sports,” which was published in 2014.

A Kent, Wash., native who earned his undergraduate degree at Pacific Lutheran and a Ph. D at Nebraska, Grant began running at age 42. In the 15 years since, he has completed 68 marathons, including one in all 50 states. He owns the “Six Star” medal for running all six of the major world marathons.

At Linfield, Grant teaches four sports economics classes. Were it not summer break, the demise of the Pac-12 would surely be a hot topic.

“For the U of O, the Big Ten may be a chance for better exposure and more NIL opportunity,” Grant says. “As far as it taking away from academics, I have to say I’m a bit cynical about the academics that happen at that level, anyway. That’s true across the board — revenue and non-revenue sports. The athletes have so much demand for their time in athletics, academics get compromised.

“But it clearly hurts the athletes in the non-revenue-generating sports. It will increase their time out of class, the time they spend traveling. My big concern is it may end up killing off these non-revenue generating sports as the travel costs and money gets funneled to revenue sports.”

Oregon’s new league will mean more difficulties for those close to the players who want to watch the Ducks play.

“Fans and family members will have further to go for events, and more costs,” Grant says. “They will still have the short trip up to Washington and to play the LA schools, but it’s a different story if they want to see (the Ducks) play at Maryland or Rutgers or Penn State.”

Already, a couple of Oregon softball players have tweeted their distaste for the new arrangement.

“Traveling in those baseball, softball games … (teams) travel commercial,” Drinkwitz said. “They get done playing, they go to the airport. They get home, it’s 3 or 4 in the morning. Then they have to go to class. I mean, did we ask any of them?”

The question is, will the increase in revenue make up for any negatives for the folks at Oregon and Washington?

“They certainly think it will,” Grant says. “Their decision was based on the belief that they could (net) more revenue than with any other deal. They’re making an extra $10 million for five years over their next-best option.”

Former Oregon athletic director Pat Kilkenny was quoted recently as saying, “If not for Phil (Knight), we would be in the same boat as Oregon State and Washington State.”

“Eugene is a little larger, but it’s more of a college town,” Grant says. “It’s Uncle Phil who drives the difference.”

Grant suggests a possibility I’d thought about — adding OSU and Wazzu to the Big Ten to make it a 20-team conference. It could be divided into two 10-team divisions, with the Beavers and Cougars joining Oregon, Washington, UCLA and Southern Cal and four other schools (Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin for example) in the West. Unfortunately, the networks probably wouldn’t buy it.

From well-connected scribe Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury-News: “There are only two paths forward for the Cougars and Beavers. Remain in the Pac-12 — if Stanford and Cal do the same — or enter the Mountain West. The Big 12, Big Ten, ACC and SEC are simply not options. Realignment is unforgiving and based primarily on media valuation and, to a lesser extent, geography.”

I would quarrel with geography being any concern nowadays, though it absolutely should be. To have a conference that extends coast to coast is a travesty.

“The Cougars and Beavers execute extremely well given their limited resources,” Wilner writes. “But Fox and ESPN care only about brand value, TV ratings and market size.”

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One current Oregon State coach says this: “We should do everything we can to stay at the Power Five (conference) level. We have to try to keep the Pac-12 brand. Our selling point in recruiting has been, ‘You’re going to be playing with and against pros every game.’ We hope to continue that wherever we land.”

Darwin Barney, who just left the OSU baseball program after three years as an assistant coach, takes a long-range look at the Pac-12’s demise.

“Beaver baseball is a Power Five program,” Barney says. “It’s in the upper tier, the top one percent of college baseball. You have Power Five ballplayers on this team. If we end up in a smaller conference, all of a sudden these type of players might look elsewhere. That’s concerning for me.

“I don’t worry about the program in the near future. We have a good culture. We don’t lose players to the portal because guys like being here. But we saw what happened last year when we ran into a team of free agents from LSU (in the NCAA Regional), who had the top two picks in the draft (pitcher Paul Skenes and outfielder Dylan Crews). We held our own. We played well, but gosh, they were deep and the great pitching was one after another.

“Magic can still happen for us. It’s not getting any easier, but it’s still a special program that is going to do a lot of great things. It’s still Omaha or bust.”

Former baseball coach Pat Casey is a proponent of eliminating conferences and creating one 60-team Power Five division in football.

Former OSU baseball coach Pat Casey is a proponent of eliminating conferences and creating one 60-team Power Five division in football.

“Make it a professional business model,” he says. “The way things have changed, conferences are nonsense.”

Casey doesn’t think, however, that OSU baseball’s recruiting picture will change dramatically. He says the Beavers will have an advantage in going up against most Big Ten schools due to weather.

“If you’re a prospect considering Minnesota or Purdue or Indiana, you better get there and see what the conditions are like,” Casey says. “You have the kids who tell us, ‘I wanted to come here, but another school has more resources, more scouts looking at them.’ Not a lot you can do about that.

“Then you have kids who say, ‘I want to play for Oregon State. I like the school, I like the program.’ If somebody wants a player we have, well, if it’s Washington State or San Diego State or Cal, we won’t lose them. But to think we’re going to get a guy based on money if the SEC or Big 12 wants him? That’s a different deal.”

In football, recruits are going to notice. Oregon State commits Exodus Ayers and David Abajian said in interviews that they would consider reevaluating their options if the Beavers were left out of a “power” conference.

The Pac-4 schools would seem to have little remaining confidence in Kliavkoff. Last week they hired XFL commissioner Oliver Luck — father of former Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck — as a consultant. A former NFL QB who worked for the NCAA from 2014-18 as executive VP/regulatory affairs, Luck is “a smart guy who knows a lot about a lot of things,” Riley says.

God knows, the Pac-12 can use his help.

“This conference has mismanaged itself on a bunch of different levels,” Wazzu athletic director Pat Chun told reporters. “When you have poor leadership, one of the outcomes is failure. That’s what has happened to the Pac-12.”

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The most likely scenario has the remaining four Pac-12 schools — assuming Stanford and Cal don’t affiliate elsewhere — merging with some or all of the 12 Mountain West schools. The preference would be to keep the Pac-12 as the brand and intellectual property, since it could maintain its Power Five status and keep tens of millions of dollars in future CFP and NCAA Basketball Tournament payouts.

The Pac-12 media-rights contract expires next year, but a merged league could play under the Mountain West deal that extends through 2025-26.

If the Pac-12 were to attempt to poach select Mountain West schools, it might be cost prohibitive. San Diego State, for instance, has a $34 million exit fee that goes to $17 million in 2025 before disappearing in 2026. The Pac-12 would have to be at six schools by the start of the 2024-25 academic year.

Oregon State’s financial intake is going to fall dramatically regardless. In 2022, the $42.4 million the school received in combined media rights and football postseason and NCAA basketball championships distributions from the Pac-12 made up slightly more than half of its athletic budget ($83 million). The $40 million Washington State received made up 47 percent of its $85 million budget.

Boise State, meanwhile, received $8.7 million and San Diego State $7.8 million from the Mountain West during the 2022-23 academic year.

On Saturday, Stewart Mandel of The Athletic tweeted this: “If the Pac-12 stays put and expands, here is a potential lineup: Stanford, Cal, Oregon State, Washington State, San Diego State, Boise State, Fresno State, SMU, Tulane, Rice. Probably around $10 million/year TV. Likely gets fifth CFP auto berth most years. No East Coast travel. Wait until ’25 for MWC teams.”

That sounds like a fortuitous result from all that has happened the past 13 months.

Mandel also writes, “Oregon State and Washington State’s aspirations should be TCU, Houston and Cincinnati. All schools that got kicked to the side at one point and, over many years earned their way back to the main stage.”

The conference debacle couldn’t come at a worse time for Oregon State, which just completed a $161 million dollar renovation of Reser Stadium and will show it off for the first time with its Sept. 9 home opener against Cal Davis.

Wherever the Beavers land, Bjornstad says it is full speed ahead with “Dam Nation.”

“The perspective we’re taking is, it’s out of our control,” he says. “What we can control is our efforts in supporting our student-athletes. It emphasizes the call to Beaver Nation to say, ‘Look what we’ve built — facilities, coaches, great athletes. Our job hasn’t changed. We’ll keep moving forward.’ ”

OSU head baseball coach Mitch Canham says what is happening with the Pac-12 “might put an extra chip on the shoulders” of his players in their final year of a full conference. Bjornstad thinks that could happen in football, too.

“We have set ourselves up to have a heck of a year,” he says. “I think we have the best team in the Pac-12. Let’s go out and win the thing.”

It would be a heck of a way to go out, for sure.

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