The postmortem is still being performed on the Pac-12 Conference to figure out how things went so wrong, so fast. However, sometimes it’s just nice to have someone who understands the inner workings spell it out for you in plain English.
WWE president Nick Khan was a guest on The Town with Matthew Belloni this week, ostensibly to discuss this weekend’s WrestleMania as well as WWE’s $5 billion deal with Netflix and what the company will look like without Vince McMahon.
Khan, who has an extensive history in the world of sports media, having launched ICM’s sports media department and heading CAA’s television department, also commented on the situation regarding college athletics, where conference realignment and consolidation are reshaping the entire landscape.
New pod: The post-Vince @WWE, how the $5B Netflix deal happened, and why the heck #Wrestlemania is outside in Philadelphia. With its president Nick Khan. Listen! https://t.co/wjeZAc8K83
— Matthew Belloni (@MattBelloni) April 3, 2024
As part of a larger conversation around the ever-rising trajectory of sports media rights payments, Khan zeroed in on how the old rules don’t seem to apply anymore.
“You say Fox say ‘Hey, we’re gonna do college football on Friday nights,’ which was typically sacred ground. You don’t mess with high school football. The NFL, you saw what they did on Christmas Day,” said Khan. “So all of these old rules, even if you look at the college sports landscape of, ‘Hey, we’re one conference, we don’t mess with your conference.’ Those have all been erased. And everyone’s looking out for what they’re supposed to look out for, which is their own entity. How do they maximize dollars?'”
Belloni then asked where Khan saw the college football world going, with rumors of further consolidation and a “Super League” ongoing. Eventually, he came around to the recently departed Pac-12 and how they simply were not set up to succeed in the modern sports media rights landscape.
“I would think they should,” said Khan regarding whether or not the most powerful schools should just make their own rights deals outside of the NCAA. “Outside of March Madness, which is still coordinated by the NCAA, what do you need that for?
“So you have the SEC… you have the Big Ten. You saw the Big 12 and Big Ten just decimate the Pac-12. Oh my god. R.I.P. And it almost seemed like the Pac-12 was playing by rules from decades ago and everyone else was playing by the modern rules.”
“Don’t get me started,” responded Belloni. “The demise of the Pac-12, there needs to be a book.”
“Embarrassing,” replied Khan, who then praised Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark for positioning the conference well, in part by picking off schools from the Pac-12.
Belloni then asked Khan who represented the Pac-12 in their failed media rights negotiations.
“A gentleman I had never heard of,” he said.
“So they had bad representation,” added Belloni.
“It certainly doesn’t seem like it turned out the way that it would have if you had good representation,” said Khan.
The gentleman in question was Doug Perlman, owner of Sports Media Advisors, who was hired by the conference in 2022 to negotiate media rights on their behalf. It would be fair to say that Khan is not the first person to say that Perlman was not the right person for the job.
“Doug was way too nice and mild in my view,” a source with knowledge of the negotiation told John Canzano last year. “You need cold-blooded killers in this business.”
Of course, there were more factors involved than just Perlman and the Pac-12’s issues started long before those media rights negotiations ever began.
But, man, you certainly don’t want any potential clients listening to this podcast.
[The Town with Matthew Belloni]
