One of George Kliavkoff’s first moves as commissioner of the Pac-12 was starting the Alliance with the ACC and Big Ten this past summer as the conference landscape was up in the air. “There's nothing about the Alliance that doesn't mean we won't continue to work with the other two conferences,” Kliavkoff said of the reasoning for the three leagues not partnering with the SEC or Big 12. “But one of them just announced adding teams and one of them was losing teams and it was not clear at the moment that we were talking about the Alliance that the Big 12 was going to continue as an entity.” Kliavkoff said the Alliance wanted to “add some stability to a collegiate athletics atmosphere that was incredibly unstable.” He feels that the three conferences deciding to not add any members helped “quell what was going on” and allowed the Big 12 to remain intact for now.
Meanwhile, Kliavkoff was bullish in Olympic sports, saying, “I hate referring to (them) as non-revenue because I think those are opportunities. … These are all revenue opportunities. These are growing sports.” As for the Pac-12 media deals, which still have several years remaining, Kliavkoff is encouraged by the conference owning all of its rights. "We don't have an equity partner in our media rights," he sad. "So we'd be able to start from scratch, slice and dice the content distributed on many different platforms."
