USC made stunning moves this past week when they announced they were on their way to their B1G Conference. The move sent shockwaves across the sport and it’s the second such time that USC has done so this year. Whatever their reasoning for leaving the Pac-12, joining the B1G is a much better fit. USC has always prided itself on the combination of championship athletics with world class academics. USC is always a Top 25 institution in the polls from USA Today, Newsweek, and others. It’s this blend of excellence in everything that eventually led them away from the Pac-12.
This move goes back to the hiring of Larry Scott as conference CEO. Larry Scott is without a doubt one of the worst CEO’s to have ever run a billion dollar business. He made stunning stupid decision after stunningly stupid decision, each decision taking valuable millions away from the very people he was supposed to have been helping. There was his decision to start a Pac-12 Network and then be such a stickler about its pricing and tier that most carriers opted to not even include it and some never carried it. Think about that for a second. Some people were never able to watch Pac-12 football because of their carrier, but Scott expected them to switch to a carrier that did carry the network.
Then there was the time Larry Scott decided the Pac-12 Network needed to have its own media wing and in-house production. So, Tennis Larry decided he was going to rent out a building in San Francisco for the princely sum of $6.9m in rent and $11.7m in deferred rent. That means the building was nearly $20m while every other conference decided to spend no more than $1m or so, and some didn’t even spend close to that. You wanna look at things that made USC say “this conference has no hope,” start with the ten years the Pac-12 was paying that for a building while taking in next to nothing to give their teams.
What ended up happening was that the divide between what the smart conferences were making in revenue began to run circles around the revenue of the supposedly more “savvy” West Coast league. Eventually USC began to take notice of all the dollars they weren’t making and eventually faced a fork in the road. They could stay with the Pac-12 through the new changes and hope that it all worked out or they could call it a career on the Pac-12 and make the jump to a conference that already “gets it.”
USC made the smart choice. They decided they had no more time to lose and couldn’t really afford to fall any further behind the money train. Schools like Oregon, Washington, Oregon State, Utah, and Colorado simply aren’t money-makers. Nobody is paying for those games. West Coast fans simply have more to do and the money isn’t there for those contests. The lifestyle of the West Coast will never be “just sports” because there is simply too much to do. California offers simply too many options all year round. But the B1G is absolutely savage about football and USC knows that a game versus Michigan in the Big House is going to sell like gangbusters, same with a game against Ohio State in the Coliseum. We’ve already seen in back in 2008.
The Pac-12 made their choice when they stuck with Larry Scott despite the fact that he was a complete disaster. He never should have been Pac-12 commissioner. He never should have been around a football league. Hell, he never should have been anything other than a Taco Bell drive-thru worker. Instead he’s the reason one of the oldest conferences in the league was destroyed with two colleges leaving because of his sheer ineptitude. USC did what it had to do because it realized it no longer needed the feeble Pac-12 to survive.
