A remarkable thing around this year’s rounds of conference realignment in particular is how many of the parties at least somewhat involved appear unhappy with the eventual outcomes. That’s included school officials seeming less than thrilled with where they wound up, and it’s included tributes to former conferences and rivalries from media companies whose game rights offers were a big part of why this realignment that took out those things happened. And on Wednesday at the Sports Business Journal Intercollegiate Athletics Forum with Learfield, Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark (whose conference picked up four of the 10 departing Pac-12 teams) said he’s “not happy about the ultimate outcome to the Pac-12”:
Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark on realignment: “I’m a firm believer that consolidation breeds stability and certainty. … Excited about our future, obviously not happy about the ultimate outcome to the Pac-12.”
— Matt Fortuna (@Matt_Fortuna) December 6, 2023
Look, it’s somewhat understandable why Yormark would say that. There’s no value to him in publicly dancing on the Pac-12’s grave (even if it may be only mostly dead, any new Pac-12 will be very different). And that’s especially true given the many outpourings of fond memories for the conference recently.
And yes, Yormark didn’t necessarily set out to destroy the Pac-12 in its current form. And there were plenty of others involved in its eventual demise. That started with school and conference leadership, which started their current predicament with the Pac-12 Networks plan and its lack of distribution. They then vastly overvalued the Pac-12’s next media rights, made a counteroffer ESPN was never going to take, and conducted a long negotiation with Apple that ended with a low-guarantee offer unacceptable to some schools.
Beyond internal leadership, there are other responsible parties as well. That includes the SEC, which started this current wave of realignment by poaching Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12 in 2021. Following that, the Big Ten raided the Pac-12 for USC and UCLA last year, then Oregon and Washington this year.
There’s also Fox, which didn’t make an offer to retain Pac-12 rights and provided the extra money to add Oregon and Washington to the Big Ten without diluting the current schools’ payouts. And there’s ESPN, which wasn’t that interested in keeping the Pac-12 after their initial offer was rejected. And there are the departing schools, who all made their own choices to leave.
But even with all that said, Yormark played a major role in the end of the Pac-12. Yes, his “We are open for business” quotes last summer weren’t necessarily directly targeted at the Pac-12. And they were a smart and vague thing to say publicly. But they certainly indicated the Big 12’s aggressiveness in looking at expansion.
And the combination of those public comments and supposed behind-the-scenes discussions led to Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff blowing his stack at Yormark. That saw lines like “We haven’t decided if we’re going shopping there yet or not” directly targeted at the Big 12, plus claims they were going after his schools. “I’ve been spending four weeks trying to defend against grenades lobbed in from every corner of the Big 12, trying to destabilize our remaining conference.”
And the Big 12 did eventually grab Colorado this summer. And that paved the way for the Washington and Oregon exits for the Big Ten. And those exits then led to Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah joining the Big 12, really sealing the doom of the Pac-12 in its current form. So Yormark’s “obviously not happy about the ultimate outcome to the Pac-12” seems a bit much given his role, and reminiscent of I Think You Should Leave‘s man in a hot dog suit claiming “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this” about his crashed weinermobile:
Yormark is far from the only one with responsibility here. And the decisions he’s made seem to be logical ones for him and his conference, and they’ve put the Big 12 in reasonable shape going forward and helped that conference survive the losses of Oklahoma and Texas. But he did have a lot to do with that “ultimate outcome to the Pac-12.”
[Matt Fortuna on Twitter]
