Breaking down Colorado to the Big 12 ... and yes it DOES impact Texas

Who says you can never go home?

Colorado made it official Thursday, voting to re-join the Big 12, the conference they were a founding member of but then spurred in 2011 for the (greener?) pastures of the Pac-12.

The latest move in the conference realignment merry-go-round came about as a result of the bigger programs seeking out their own fortunes. Texas and OU started it when they announced they would leave the Big 12 to move to the SEC. Then USC and UCLA ditched the Pac-12 for long flights into the Big Ten.

But this isn’t a story about conference realignment as much as it is a story about leadership.

Colorado is moving because one leader was able to create stability with his conference while the other leader created an environment of uncertainty.

"After careful thought and consideration, it was determined that a switch in conference would give CU Boulder the stability, resources, and exposure necessary for long-term future success in a college athletics environment that is constantly evolving," said Colorado chancellor Philip DiStefano and athletic director Rick George in a joint statement.

Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark arrived in a moment of peril for the conference. Texas and OU had just announced they were leaving for the SEC and taking their cash cows with them. At that time, it looked more likely that the remaining eight would be scooped up by the Pac-12 than they would remain together. In fact, it was a very real possibility that multiple Big 12 schools would move west but the Pac-12 leaders declined.

But instead of letting the rest of his properties break apart, Yormark went on the offensive and landed BYU, Cincinnati, UCF and Houston as new Big 12 members.

Then, a little more than a year ago, Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff found himself in the same position when USC and UCLA announced they were bolting for the Big Ten.

The Pac-12 and the Big 12 both had similar predicaments. Each conference had seen two of their marquee programs bolt for one of the Power 2 conferences. All of the remaining Big 12 programs and all of the remaining Pac-12 programs were left wondering, what’s next? How can we survive?

Both commissioners decided that the path to survival lay in a new media rights deal which would secure the future of the conference financially and put it on a path to stability. But the two commissioners had two separate ideas on how to go about that.

Kliavkoff came to the Pac-12 with a deep understanding of the streaming world. He worked for MLB Advanced Media at one point (baseball’s internet and interactive company), he worked for NBC Universal where he helped launch Hulu, and he worked at Hearst, one of the largest media companies in the US.

With that background in mind, Kliavkoff opened the exclusive negotiating window with the Pac-12’s current broadcast partners Fox and ESPN … but the consensus was that he wanted to go to the open market where he felt he could get more value for the Pac-12 rights. What has followed has been a series of rumors of negotiations still continuing to some degree with ESPN (Fox is out) but also a lot of different streaming properties such as Amazon and Apple TV.

I say these are rumors because the truth is, Kliavkoff has kept his cards very close to his chest. None of the people he works for (the Pac-12 university presidents and athletic directors) seem to know where those negotiations stand.

Meanwhile, Yormark has a more traditional background having done sports media rights sales and marketing for a number of organizations before going to the New York Nets and then Roc Nation.

Yormark also opened the negotiating window with the conference’s current partners, Fox and ESPN, but he quickly sealed a six year, $2.3 billion extension of its deal with the networks, securing the conference financially. Every member would receive more than $31 million annually in rights fees. And, more importantly for today’s conversation, included a provision that any new members would receive a full share, as long as they were already another member of a Power-5 conference.

Ed Desser, the founding President of NBA TV, who now works owns Desser media, which negotiates media rights deals for its clients, told me the Big 12’s timing was fortuitous.

“What the big 12 recognized was that they're not the SEC or Big 10 and so, time was not their friend,” said Desser. “So they decided to act quickly. That was a strategic decision based upon a desire to strike early and take advantage of, of the then uncertainty in the marketplace.”

The marketplace has changed dramatically since the Big 12 secured its deal, potentially impacting the Pac-12 as it pushed its media rights package onto the open market.

Both Amazon and ESPN, two properties the Pac-12 has reportedly been negotiating with, have seen massive layoffs. Those layoffs won’t necessarily preclude the Pac-12 from eventually getting a deal, but it doesn’t help.

“It's harder to justify, if you're in management at any network, when on the one hand, you're laying off hundreds of employees and on the other hand, you're buying a bunch of rights. It’s not a great look,” said Desser. “But I don't think it's fair to say that layoffs at ESPN are responsible for the Pac-12 not having a deal.”

Desser is right, ESPN laying off employees will not prevent the network from securing live broadcast rights. After all, ESPN showing live sports is the lifeblood of the company. Without that, the network would shrivel and die.

To that point, sports is one of the only tv offerings (linear or streaming) that people actually watch live. It’s the reason that Disney (ESPN’s parent company) CEO Rober Iger said earlier while it could be looking to sell some of its television assets, ESPN will not be going anywhere.

“We want to stay in the sports business,” said Iger.

However, Iger confirmed that Disney is looking to offer ESPN as a streaming service at some point in the future – but they don’t want to do it alone.

"We're going to be open-minded... not necessarily about spinning ESPN off but about looking for strategic partners that can either help us with distribution or content," Iger said.

All of that is a long winded way of saying … now is not necessarily the best time to be trying to secure a media rights deal to save your conference.

Of course, that point seems to be lost on Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff.

“The longer we wait for the media deal, the better our options get,” Kliavkoff said at the Pac-12 Media Day last week.

That comment may have been the straw that broke the Buffaloes back.

Colorado Chancellor Philip DiStefano has been saying for months that he has been waiting on a new deal and his expectation was that it would exceed the Big 12’s media rights deal.

But after months and months of waiting, no deal has been offered. What’s more, Kliavkoff has preferred to negotiate in silence, not letting his members know where they stand.

A seemingly frustrated DiStefano told the Denver Post last week that he was expecting to hear numbers from Kliavkoff during a meeting the day before the Pac-12 Media Day.

“I’m eagerly awaiting to hear what the commissioner has to say,” DiStefano told The Post in on July 19th, one day before the conference meeting. “But at this point, the 10 (Pac-12) schools are staying together and awaiting a message from the commissioner.”

The meeting came and Kliavkoff either didn’t have any numbers to offer or he withheld them from the group.

One week later, Colorado was voting to leave the Pac-12 and join the Big 12.

The Pac-12 now finds itself down a man and still doesn’t have a media rights deal in place. If the Pac-12 had a deal worth doing, it would have already been done and the league would have signed a new grant of rights, locking its members in place.

But the drawn out media rights negotiations created an air of instability which forced Colorado to make the move. Now with CU gone, the perception of instability is heightened.

The Pac-12 is down to nine members and the rest of those nine members have to be considering whether they need to make a move themselves. The dynamics that forced CU’s hand remain true for them too, probably even more so.

“The real core issue here is this is a conference that wasn't satisfied with the money it was getting,” said Desser. “All that's happened since then, is the rich have gotten richer.”

The Pac-12 STILL does not have a media rights deal. The loss of Colorado certainly won’t help. The Big 12 now looks stronger than ever.

At Colorado's press conference, chancellor Phil DiStefano says "CU Boulder is a national university, and by spanning three time zones, the Big 12 is very much a national conference."

Kliavkoff needs a deal soon or he will lose even more schools.

“All I keep saying is, you know, we’re just waiting to get a deal,” Arizona president Robert C. Robbins told The Athletic’s Max Olson. “And then everybody has to evaluate the deal on its merits. I’ve been pretty steadfast in that stance.”

But no deal appears to be imminent. In fact, earlier this month, Kliavkoff told reporters that there was even a new media entity joining the negotiations. Starting fresh with a new media partner doesn’t sound like there will be a quick fix to the problem.

Even if Kliavkoff is able to hold on to the rest of the conference, that by itself isn’t good enough. Considering the league plays a nine-game conference football schedule, they’re going to have to find a new member quickly – before the 2024 season.

“Now it's a matter of trying to get the best series of options lined up and kind of knowing what it is you're selling in terms of who your members are,” said Desser. Those those things are unclear.”

And yet, Kliavkoff insists it’s the media rights deal first and then expansion.This was the message published after an emergency meeting last night (Thursday).

The most likely new additions remains San Diego State and SMU. Kliavkoff has visited both campuses in the last year.

Assuming the Pac-12 doesn’t lose anybody else, San Diego State in place of Colorado could end up being a wash, as far as the media partners are concerned.

“If you replace them [Colorado] with San Diego then you're getting about the same market size,” said Desser. “It's not going to make all that much of a difference.”

For Texas fans, the move may seem completely irrelevant. In case you haven’t heard, (and if you haven’t, then why are you reading this?) this is UT’s last season in the Big 12 before heading to the SEC in 2024. There is a tendency to just say, ‘who cares what the Big 12 does next year?’

However, I’m here to tell you that Colorado’s return to the Big 12 does impact Texas and here’s why….

First off, I am convinced that this move would not have happened without Deion Sanders as the head coach at CU. Sanders had to have been in the ears of AD Rick George and Chancellor Phil DiStefano letting them know that playing games in Texas would only help.

Colorado may be down now, but they have won a national championship in my lifetime. They did it by heavily recruiting the state of Texas. When the Buffs left for the Pac-12, that recruiting pipeline to Texas dried up.

Incidentally, the same thing happened to Arkansas. They were once a powerhouse while playing in the Southwest Conference. But their move to the SEC may have helped financially, but their recruiting fortunes in the Lone Star State nosedived and so did their football prowess. Of course, the opposite happened to Oklahoma State. It was a program in the Big 8 that was a perennial loser. When the Cowboys joined the Big 12, they began to land a lot more Texas kids and they are now a powerhouse.

Sanders has already shown that he is not content to just recruit to the level of school where he is coaching. This is a man who landed the number one recruit in the country while he was working at an FCS school.

Now that he is going to be playing even more games within the state of Texas, do you think he will be content to just let Texas and OU go after the biggest names and then try to scoop up what is left over?

Texas, under Steve Sarkisian, has done a very good job of targeting athletes in the Dallas/Fort Worth area (especially the I-20 corridor). But that just happens to be where Coach Prime has the most connections after spending a good chunk of his NFL career playing for the Dallas Cowboys and then coaching high school in the Metroplex.

The number of athletes that Texas is competing with head-to-head with Colorado is only going to go up from here.

Certainly, Sark has proven he is one of the best recruiters in the country. But Sanders is a force upon himself and he’s going to get his.

And now he’s playing on an even bigger stage with more attention.

And if you don’t believe me, just tune in to Fox at noon (ET) on September 2nd.Colorado vs. TCU is the national game of the week … and you’re going to hear a LOT about Deion Sanders during the game.