PULLMAN, Wash. — Washington State University's Board of Regents chair released a statement through the school's YouTube channel Sunday night, saying she was "stunned" by the decisions of Washington and Oregon to leave the Pac-12 Conference.
Lisa Schauer said "no one on the WSU team is to blame" over the fractured state of the Pac-12, which saw Arizona and Arizona State, as well as Utah depart for the Big 12 Conference in addition to the moves by UW and Oregon to the Big Ten.
"On Thursday, WSU President Kirk Schulz and Athletics Director Pat Chun presented to me an innovative media plan that would position the Pac-12 to lead the Power Five conferences into the future," Schauer said. "The following morning, they were stunned when the University of Washington and the University of Oregon decided to accept offers from the Big 10. This was not expected based on what appeared to be good faith negotiations."
Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff presented a media rights deal from Apple to University presidents at the conference last week.
Revenues from the Apple deal were not expected to approach the roughly $30 million per year Oregon and Washington will receive from the Big Ten for their first six years in the conference, with annual escalators and the ability to draw on future payments, a person familiar with the negotiations told the Associated Press on Friday.
UW President Ana Mari Cauce indicated there was an early opt-out clause that gave them pause on the Apple deal.
“It was backward and forward and there were moments when I thought it was going in one direction and then in another,” Cauce said. “At the end we looked at the deal that we had — the only deal that we had — and it was clear that it was not giving us what we thought. It was not the deal that we had been discussing just days before and it was not going to secure (us).”
After all the dust settled, WSU was just one of four schools remaining in what was left of the Pac-12. Along with Oregon State, California and Stanford, the future of the conference is very much up in the air.
UCLA and USC were the first dominos to drop, announcing a move to the Big Ten in 2022. Colorado announced its move to return to the Big 12 in late July, leaving just nine schools in the latest media rights negotiations.
Momentum was building towards these schools departing for weeks leading up to the announcement, and a number of schools clearly were preparing contingency plans to possibly leave the conference before Friday's flurry of moves.
The conference will continue through the 2023-24 academic year with its full 12 members. The eight programs that have accepted invitations to other conferences will leave the conference before the 2024-25 season.
