Story by Antonio Morales, Stewart Mandel, Doug Haller and Christian Caple.
There were no cups, so the only option Rick Neuheisel, Ronnie Lott, Summer Sanders, and everyone else in the Pac-12 Networks green room had for this occasion was to pass the bottle of Dom Pérignon and drink straight from it.
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It was Aug. 15, 2012, and all the conference’s presidents/CEOs and athletic directors had been invited to the studio to watch the live launch of the Pac-12 Networks.
In the green room afterward, Neuheisel, a 25-year coaching veteran, gave a de facto victory speech.
“(Rick) basically was like, I learned when I was a coach, you have to celebrate every win because you never know when you’re gonna get the next one,” said Pac-12 Networks host Ashley Adamson, “and this right here is a win and to be here with all of you. It’s just this inspirational, unbelievable speech that still gives me goosebumps to think about.”
When the network hit television airwaves 10 years ago today, it was supposed to put the Pac-12 ahead of its peers in the media landscape and usher in a new era of revenue and exposure for the league. The ensuing decade has instead been defined by a string of public embarrassments: questionable strategy and spending by former commissioner Larry Scott, whiffed coaching hires by multiple football programs, apathetic fan bases and USC and UCLA’s stunning decampment for the Big Ten.
But there’s been no greater poster for the conference’s issues than the network that started as a bold vision and endures as a cautionary tale. While the remaining Pac-12 members ponder their next broadcast rights deal, the network presses on with more questions than ever. Ten years later, DirecTV still doesn’t carry the networks — though it turns out the league’s own presidents once turned down that opportunity.
With a decade behind it and an uncertain future ahead of it, here is the story of the rise and fall of the Pac-12 Network through the eyes of the executives, on-air talent and league members who were a part of it. Scott, ousted as commissioner last year, declined to comment for this story, citing his separation agreement with the conference.
In 2009, the Pac-10 hired Larry Scott as its new commissioner. Scott, previously CEO of the Women’s Tennis Association, made an early splash with his audacious attempt to add Texas, Oklahoma and four other Big 12 schools. Only Colorado and Utah joined, but in May 2011, Scott landed a massive 12-year, $3 billion deal with ESPN and Fox for the conference’s Tier 1 rights. The newly rebranded Pac-12 went from a distant fifth among conferences in TV revenue (around $60 million a year) to first (an average of $250 million a year).
The industry-changing Big Ten Network was then four years old. Scott, working closely with sports TV consultant Chris Bevilacqua, wanted a conference network of his own.
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Kevin Weiberg, Pac-12 deputy commissioner (2010-14), previously VP of Big Ten Network: (Scott) very much liked the idea of the Pac having its own network, so that was definitely a focus for Larry … there was a lot of confidence in the idea that Larry could produce something really good from this network.
Bill Moos, Washington State’s AD (2010-18): I was thrilled with the whole concept. What I was excited about, being at Washington State, was the prospect of having tremendous exposure for our programs. I felt that we could get our message out, not just the Pac-12 message but Washington State’s message, and that it could be extremely beneficial in recruiting.
Weiberg: We went through a very exhaustive process of sort of thinking through what the options were. I spent a lot of time, as did Larry and other members of our staff, in New York, visiting with network leaders and people in the cable industry and so forth. Maybe with the exception of ESPN, almost every one of the major media companies at least looked at it and was willing to talk about it. I don’t think (ESPN) ever seriously expressed interest in it.
Whereas BTN was co-owned by the Big Ten and Fox, Scott and his conference presidents chose to retain full ownership of their network, a decision that would come to haunt the league down the road. At the time it was announced, the Pac-12 had already secured distribution agreements with its region’s four major cable providers, Comcast, Time Warner, Cox and Brighthouse — but notably, not DirecTV. The cable companies sought not just a national network but six regional Pac-12 networks (Oregon, Washington, Bay Area, Los Angeles, Arizona and Mountain) that would show programming and games specific to the schools in each area.
Kirk Reynolds, Pac-12 Networks VP of communications (2012-16): For those of us who hadn’t been in that space before, what we didn’t understand was the idea of distribution of that kind of content and seven networks — it was a novel idea. But that’s really the story we were telling. That’s the story that was celebrated, because it was something new and different. But now that we look back on it, was that the right approach?
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Weiberg: I was really unsure about (the model), to be honest with you, because I had participated in the distribution effort for Big Ten Network with a major media company partner in Fox, and had we not had Fox as a partner, I’m not sure we would have achieved full distribution for Big Ten Network.
In August 2011, Scott hired Gary Stevenson, who previously helped launch Golf Network, as president of Pac-12 Enterprises (which included the networks). He and his senior staff had a year to locate space and construct a studio facility, sell sponsorships and hire a production staff and on-air talent. In February 2012, they broke ground at 360 3rd St. in San Francisco, in the same building as Comcast Sports Bay Area.
Bob Schmelzle, senior director of content production: They spent about 12 months putting together the senior staff and three months scrambling to put together everyone else.
Scott Adametz, director, system architecture & technology: The plan was to put everything in place in five months. Everyone told us we needed two years to do what we did in five months.
Rick Neuheisel, football studio analyst (2012-14): We were playing Oregon in the first-ever Pac-12 championship game (in 2011), and I had been told I was gone, so this was going to be my last game (at UCLA). And I remember being out on the field throwing some passes to my son before the team came out for warmups. Larry Scott came over and said, “I got a proposal for you. I want you to consider being on our air.”
Ashley Adamson, studio host and reporter: I remember I showed up Aug. 1, and from the second I sat down at my desk, those were like 12- to 16-hour days. We did a half-hour preview show on every single sport, and then we did one on every single football team. There was just so much (to do).
Schmelzle: The big thing for us was staffing. A (production assistant) was on a tour visiting a friend who worked here and had just graduated, so (senior vice president Leon Schweir) asked her, “Oh, you’re looking for a job in sports? Do you want to work here?” A giant box showed up four days later. Her mom had shipped up her clothes from San Diego.
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Mike Yam, lead studio host (2012-20), hired from ESPN: I did “SportsCenter” on a Saturday, flew out on a Sunday and then was in an HR meeting Monday, then we launched on Wednesday. … I got pulled out of my HR meeting to go straight down to the studio to start working right away.
Adamson: The day before launch, I’m walking down the hallway and the tiles on the floor are pulled up and everyone’s scrambling, there’s wires everywhere. I remember thinking, how are we going to actually get on television?
Adametz: The main broadcast set had a “trophy case” that we had planned to fill with medals from the athletes. It was prominently behind the anchors on set. Problem was, we had no medals on launch day. Lydia Murphy-Stephans, our GM, happened to be an Olympian (in speed skating), so she brought in all her medals/trophies/awards.
Adamson: Launch night is still one of my favorite memories, personally and professionally. I’ve never been so nervous in my life.
Mark Petix, programming manager (2012-19): That launch night, I’ll never forget it. We had the mayor of San Francisco (Ed Lee) in the building. Everybody was kind of huddled around the main area there on the third floor near the reception desk. I still remember when 6 o’clock hit, there was a two-second delay before we actually went on air, and probably the longest two-second gasp you could possibly have. We came on the air with Yam and Ashley Adamson and our “Pac-12 Live” show, and it was just a huge party, to be honest.
Yam: Those were some great days, those early days at Pac-12 Network.
With the ESPN/Fox deal done, the initial intent behind the Pac-12 Networks wasn’t so much about money — nor was it about featuring the league’s best football games. It was about showcasing the conference’s Olympic sports. Before launching, Scott promised the Pac-12 presidents only that the networks wouldn’t lose money. This was later disputed.
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Neuheisel: I said we need to have some good (football) games if we’re going to make people find the game. It was actually the same strategy the SEC Network employed when they started their network. Remember that South Carolina-Texas A&M game? That was on their channel. The ACC did the same thing when they started that opening weekend with all those conference games, making sure that people had to tune in.
Petix: I will never forget this. On one of (DirecTV’s) FAQ pages, they said, “We do not have any carriage deal with the Pac-12 Networks at this time. However, we can assure you the bulk of quality Pac-12 games can be seen on Fox and ESPN,” and then listed out the scores in weeks 1-3 of the games that were on Pac-12 Networks. And it was one of the strongest flexes I’ve seen. It was bullet points of (blowout scores). You didn’t see a close result. [The average margin for all games aired by the network through its first five seasons was 23.7 points.]
Michael K. Young, Washington president (2011-15): The design was to make available (football) games of marginal interest. It sounds kind of insulting, but games that were not necessarily going to be picked up by ESPN. … And then to pick up an awful lot of the subsidiary sports.
Weiberg: I don’t remember Larry sort of trying to sell the idea that this could achieve at the high (revenue) level, but he certainly did explain the value of more exposure for a lot of sports that weren’t getting it and how it fit well with the culture and history of the Pac.
Arizona athletic director Greg Byrne (2010-17): I don’t remember it that way. It was absolutely a thought that the network was going to provide another revenue stream to support our athletes.
Adamson: We did so many different features on every single sport. There was “Sports Report.” We led with volleyball half the time.
Yam: We always talk about football, but the reality is, if you talk to the women’s basketball coaches, they’ll tell you how much Pac-12 Network was a game changer for them.
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Cori Close, UCLA women’s basketball coach: I signed the No. 1 recruiting class in 2014. I just don’t think we could’ve done that without being able to say, “Hey, stay home. Play in front of your families. You can’t be on TV anywhere else other than the Pac-12 to get this much exposure.” You just saw a major shift. It used to be Stanford and the 11 dwarfs. … Since then, we’ve just been killing it.
Charmin Smith, California women’s basketball coach: You think about how we’ve had an increase in the number of teams to the Final Four, even back to 2013 when we made our run. And then Kelsey Plum came along and got Washington there (in 2016). And then Sabrina (Ionescu) comes along and gets Oregon there (in 2019). These types of things were a lot more visible because of the network.
Schmelzle: It’s probably the only sports network in the world with gender equality, that’s producing more women’s sports events than men. … I (just) wish we’d done a little more with our messaging to explain what we’re about.
The Networks also gained industry praise for their creativity, especially on the technical side. In 2014 and 2015, the Networks received an Emmy nomination for their remote productions of games. Instead of using satellite uplink trucks, the Networks transported raw camera and audio feeds via the internet to the San Francisco headquarters. This made it possible to produce 850 live events. It also saved money.
Ryan Currier, senior vice president for engineering and products: We were the first network in the history of TV in the United States to launch a TV-everywhere product on the same day as a linear cable channel.
Adametz: There weren’t enough production trucks on the West Coast to produce the number of events we were supposed to do. We couldn’t do it as a traditional model. I remember meeting with Gary (Stevenson), pitching him on a different way to do it: using IP signals from all our campuses sent back to our production center, and doing multiple events simultaneously.
Adametz: ESPN came to see it. They were like, this can’t be real. How are you doing this? And we just showed them, because we were a not-for-profit, this is how we do it. We had a broadcaster fly in from Norway. They heard what we were doing and came and wanted to see it in person. It was pretty revolutionary.
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Adamson: For all the criticism that I’ve heard over the years, no one’s ever criticized the product.
Still the number of events created issues. During the 2014-15 sports season, the Pac-12 Networks produced 850 events for linear TV. By comparison, the Big Ten Network reportedly produced 500. Another problem: While the six regional networks provided a local element to carriers and fan bases, it also caused problems. Notably, the channels all looked the same.
Moos: To some degree, (the regional networks model) had its assets, but it also had its liabilities. When you have an alumni base with a rural campus like Washington State, most of your alums aren’t in Pullman or even Spokane. There are a lot of them in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, and they weren’t able to get a lot of our content because it was primarily limited to the region.
Weiberg: The idea of 850 was a very large number.
Petix: It became like a weight around your neck as the years went on. There were just too many events that we were contractually obligated to air that simply didn’t generate revenue.
Young: What I think began to happen near the end of my tenure and accelerated after I left was the realization that expenses might be slightly out of control. That is to say where they chose to site the television station, the cost of renting that, the cost of going full-blown with all the equipment to broadcast all of these different games. The size of the capital investment and so forth was a little startling.
Petix: It all comes back to dollars. All roads were always leading back to, will we or won’t we with DirecTV?
For years, Scott faced some variation of the same question at media gatherings: Are you any closer to a deal with DirecTV? The network launched without carriage on the satellite giant, which meant millions of fans inside and outside the Pac-12 footprint couldn’t watch their teams on linear television. DirecTV wasn’t willing to pay the Pac-12’s asking price in part, it contended, because it already carried the league’s top games via Fox and ESPN — and because it didn’t want to pass the cost of Pac-12 Network fees to subscribers who might not actually want the channel. The Pac-12’s original carriage agreements also include a “Most Favored Nation” clause that prevents it from charging one carrier a lower rate than any other.
The two parties waged a p.r. battle, which included the Pac-12 using clever TV ads encouraging DirecTV subscribers to switch providers if they wanted the network. With neither side budging — and no major partner to apply pressure — the network trudged forward without it.
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Reynolds: I remember (Michael) White, the head of DirecTV, came out and said right at the start: “We’ll never carry seven networks. There’s no way we’re going to do that.”
Mark Shuken, Pac-12 Networks president: Every other distributor in the space carries the networks under the same terms that were offered to DirecTV.
Moos: I know Larry dug his heels in. They dug their heels in. It just never seemed like we could get any compromise. Fox owned 51 percent of the Big Ten Network [now 61 percent]. They can go to DirecTV and say, “You’ve got to take the Big Ten Network, or you’re not getting this, that and everything else.” We never got the leverage because we didn’t go out to market.
Yam: We took a lot of pride in our work, but … you throw out “Pac-12 Network,” the two things that always came up were DirecTV, and then Larry’s name.
Don MacLean, basketball color analyst: I’ve loved working at the Pac-12 Network, but the thing that has always concerned me is I have friends, people I know, that have never heard or seen me call a Pac-12 Network game. I’ve always wondered about the sustainability of the network because no one got it.
Adamson: I always said if we ever get on DirecTV, I don’t know what people are going to talk to me about anymore. That was always the first question, and rightfully so.
According to a report by Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News in 2019, schools were initially told they could make as much as $10 million a year in revenue from the networks. Through the first six fiscal years they’d received less than $10 million per school, total. The perceived shortfall only magnified the DirecTV issue.
Moos: I had a high degree of confidence that we could realistically see through the Pac-12 Networks $6 (million), $7 (million), maybe even $10 million a year per institution, once it got on its feet and got the bugs worked out.
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Byrne: We certainly thought into mid-seven figures and maybe higher than that, on an annual basis, could be another revenue stream for us. It never hit the number we were told.
Close: I thought that our alumni across the conference were going to say, “Heck no, DirecTV, we’re going to cancel everything if you don’t take on the Pac-12 Networks.” And that just didn’t happen. What we thought was this major innovative edge that the Pac-12 Networks had, it ended up actually being our Achilles’ heel.
Adamson: We wanted it more than anything, truly. And I think we all truly believed that we were gonna get it.
They came close, once, in September 2015, after AT&T — already a conference partner — took over DirecTV. According to a summary of the proposal provided to the conference CEO Group and obtained by The Athletic, the deal would have netted a projected $35 million in revenue in the first year (nearly $3 million per school), and would have put the network on DirecTV’s “Choice” tier — granting the Pac-12 access to some 16.4 million new households nationwide. The Pac-12 Networks’ entire subscriber base was estimated at around 19 million at its peak (it has since decreased, per Wilner).
Scott recommended AT&T’s offer to the conference presidents and chancellors for approval.
Ted Robinson, play-by-play broadcaster: In the conference office there was a whiteboard with the DirecTV channel assignments for this Saturday’s games. And down the hall in a meeting room, I’m told the lawyers for both sides were working out the deal. Everyone’s giddy. Everyone that knows about it thinks it’s going to happen.
Yam: It wasn’t this massive corporation where different departments were siloed. Everyone talked. So when they were running the tests on the DirecTV channels, we were like, “Oh, OK, this might be happening.” There was buzz, there was excitement, you could feel it.
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Petix: It felt like we were at the goal line, to be as cheesy as possible with the analogy. It felt like we were an announcement away from being on DirecTV.
The network could have been available on DirecTV as soon as that weekend. But there was a catch. As part of the deal, the 12 universities would be required to spend in the seven figures annually on AT&T telecom services, with the company becoming a “preferred” provider.
The presidents voted against accepting the deal.
Michael Crow, Arizona State president: It was a terrible deal and uninteresting people. They were basically not interested in doing a fair deal. No one saw that deal as fair.
Robinson: Sadly, that was the last gasp.
Adamson: That was the first time we all sort of realized: “We’re not getting on DirecTV.”
Yam: That’s when I think all of us said, “This is basically our team. Let’s just play ball. There’s nothing else we can do.”
By the time Shuken took over as Pac-12 Networks president in September 2017, two years after those failed DirecTV negotiations, the understanding was clear. “I was under no impression five years ago that at that stage DirecTV was going to launch the networks,” he said.
At that point, the Big Ten Network was already well-established. The ESPN-owned SEC Network launched in 2014 with full distribution. Both leagues utilized the success of their networks and their robust media rights deals to invest in coaches, facilities and recruiting staff. That intensified the scrutiny placed upon Scott, the media rights deal and the networks.
Neuheisel: Everybody was excited with the (financial) number, but because it was ESPN and Fox I didn’t know where we would fit in their priority list. And as it turned out, we didn’t fit very high…. And I still to this day say Christian McCaffrey lost his Heisman Trophy because of that television deal.
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Schmelzle: It guaranteed us a profit for 12 years, it just didn’t guarantee the profit they expected.
Crow: People felt that because some other conferences were getting a bigger media deal that somehow we needed to get a bigger media deal, because then it would give us more resources to compete, etc. When in fact this network was established not related to that objective. … But we obtained our objective and couldn’t obtain any additional objective because of the lock-in with our media deal.
Scott was under heavy criticism for several reasons in the latter half of the decade. The football and men’s basketball product had slipped from national relevance, his spending was considered lavish, the media rights deals lagged and football officiating was subpar — and controversial.
The other issues the network had were only accelerated. Morale suffered when the pandemic arrived in 2020 and led to layoffs. Shuken said peak staffing was 165 people, but the network has now returned to staffing in the 150s and will adjust accordingly.
Shuken: When your revenue is driven by games and games don’t exist, we had to make some tough decisions in those days, but fortunately we’re back now.
Adamson: The criticism has always been there, but … (COVID) sped up a lot of things, created a lot more financial issues than even we thought we had to begin with.
In January 2021, the Pac-12 decided to move on from Scott as commissioner. In May of that year, it announced the hiring of George Kliavkoff, who inherited several challenges at an increasingly chaotic time in college athletics.
Crow: From my perspective, Larry was the transition commissioner, from a non-media modern conference to a media modern conference. … Some people became frustrated with Larry and wanted to go in a different direction, and I supported going in a different direction when it came down to those discussions. Yes, did I support Larry because of what he had done to move us in the right direction? Yes. But it was not going to work going forward.
The email landed in reporters’ inboxes at 4:41 p.m. on June 30, with a statement from USC athletic director Mike Bohn, who had just navigated his school’s move from the Pac-12 to the Big Ten in stealth fashion. “This is the most volatile and uncertain era in the history of American collegiate athletics,” Bohn said. “USC must ensure it is best positioned and prepared for whatever happens next.”
UCLA announced its intentions to join the Big Ten the same day, leaving the conference and its network without a foothold in the second-largest media market in the country.
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A network television executive: I’m not sure what choice (USC and UCLA) had at the end of the day when the revenue is so much lower than the other schools you’re competing with.
Former senior Pac-12 Network employee: I couldn’t think of two schools who could replace them with their fan base and the amount of championships they have. That’s a gut punch. I don’t know how it’s sustainable. I don’t see how the network is in existence two years from now.
Last week, the Pac-12 received its first piece of good news in a while when it was announced that ESPN pulled out of the Big Ten media rights negotiations, seemingly increasing the network’s need for the Pac-12 and its valuable late-night Saturday time slots.
Yam: I still think there’s value for having a hub for your content. … The bigger question is going to be, how does Kliavkoff navigate this? We already know the doors are closing on that facility [the conference announced in March it would leave its San Francisco offices in favor of a work-from-home model and move its broadcast production to a new facility in 2023]. That worries me a little bit. I’m so indebted to my time there and have a lot of really great memories — I want the network to still do well. I want the network to still exist. I don’t want people to be out of work.
Shuken: I would say doomsday for the network is an overstatement of any bad news, and in fact what really we’re planning on is being the production and distribution entity for our schools and our student-athletes moving forward and that’s the opposite of doomsday. … It’s very distinct from some scenario that has us shutting the doors in 2024. It’s actually the opposite of that. It’s opening the doors for us to figure out new distribution partners, mechanisms, approaches.
With some more time removed from the raw emotions of June’s realignment news, angst has seemingly calmed a bit within the league. Aug. 17 will mark the 10-year anniversary of the network’s first live event: a Stanford-Santa Clara women’s soccer match. The major existential question moving forward is how many more live events will the network air after the current media rights deal runs out in 2024.
Adamson: Probably the thing that weighs heavy on my heart is, it will always feel like there was an unfulfilled potential of Pac-12 Network and the vision for what it could be and ultimately what it turned out to be, for a variety of reasons — some self-inflicted, some not — that’s the hardest thing for me to swallow.
(Illustration by The Athletic; Photo by Douglas Stringer /Getty Images)