SBJ College: Pac-12 takes key step toward its rebirth

If you don’t hear from me for about 10 days, I promise it’s with good reason.

On Saturday, I marry my best friend and fiancé, Ashley, before we ship off to the Dominican Republic for our honeymoon and a week of sun, sand and non-House settlement-related adventures.

Cheers, Ash. I love you and can’t wait to spend forever together.

The Pac-12’s rebuild isn’t quite complete, but it took another important step Tuesday.

As I reported this morning, the league finalized its 2025 football media deals with CBS, ESPN and The CW.

The 13-game package consists of Washington State and Oregon State’s home football games and functionally serves as a precursor to what will be a longer-term media rights deal that will incorporate the six schools coming on board next year.

The move is an important one, albeit not the final step for a league that has dragged itself back from the precipice of death.

The Pac-12 is slated to add Boise State, San Diego State, Utah State, Colorado State and Fresno State from the Mountain West, along with Gonzaga as a non-football member in 2026. It will need to add one more football-playing member as NCAA rules stipulate a conference must have eight schools to gain official sanction.

Pac-12 Commissioner Teresa Gould has messaged in recent months that the conference would likely wrap up its longer-term media rights deal before adding another member. The strategy makes sense as it’s unlikely any additional school would dramatically alter the value of the league’s larger media rights package value.

Sources told SBJ negotiations between the conference, Octagon -- which is consulting on the deal for the Pac-12 -- and potential bidders for the broader agreement remain ongoing and haven’t been finalized. That said, it’s likely The CW, CBS and/or ESPN could be involved given the conference’s desire to work with partners on the 2025 football agreements that wouldn’t just be one-year options.

As for possible financial figures, the Mountain West paid its members around $4 million annually via its media rights agreement with Fox and CBS. The bet the new-look Pac-12 -- and those schools that bolted the Mountain West -- has made is it will fetch something closer to the American Athletic Conference’s deal with ESPN that pays roughly $10 million per school.

How feasible is that? We’ll see based on the bidders, but the league has its fair share of pitch points.

Five of the Pac-12’s seven future football programs appeared in the College Football Playoff Top 25 over the last four seasons, while it also boasts two teams (San Diego State and Gonzaga) that have made the men’s basketball national title game in the last five years.

Consider the Pac-12 in the red zone on its march toward a full rebirth (significantly different membership aside).

Now comes the final push.

It’s not every day Death Valley is outfitted for a baseball game.

Clemson hosted the Savannah Bananas on Saturday night in the stadium usually reserved for Tigers football. And while Dabo Swinney’s crew will take over the place again this fall, the Bananas drew their share of fans -- 81,000, to be exact.

“It was a different vibe than a football Saturday,” Clemson AD Graham Neff told me. “Namely, because about 40% of the ticket buyers were from out of state, we don’t have the exact customer data. The Savannah Bananas own that. But generally, it was a lot of first time to Clemson, first time to Memorial Stadium folks.”

As part of the arrangements for the show, the Bananas received revenues from ticket sales and merchandise. Clemson, meanwhile, took home parking, premium sales and F&B.

Clemson doesn’t yet know its exact returns on Saturday night’s contest, but they should be significant. Neff estimated the school would bring in somewhere between $400,000 and $600,000 in gross take from the game -- not bad for a night Memorial Stadium would otherwise have sat empty.

Part of that equation was the addition of alcohol sales. Clemson approved a plan to allow beer and wine sales at Memorial Stadium and other sporting events earlier this month. The spring football game on April 5 marked the debut, while Saturday night’s affair marked just the second time booze flowed officially in Death Valley since the policy change.

“This was a big opportunity for that from a revenue standpoint, sure, but as much or more so from operations, management and mitigation efforts in the stadium,” Neff said. “Spring game we announced 35,000 [fans]. Obviously, baseball and softball are on a lesser scale. So, as we point toward fall football and Week 1 for us being LSU, we used this as a huge opportunity to run through our alcohol points of sale and distribution plans in an 80,000-[person] scale event.”

That Clemson and the Bananas pulled off an evening that would’ve made P.T. Barnum proud is also another nod toward how schools may look to better monetize their venues in the offseason.

The proposed House settlement would likely see schools searching for millions in additional cash to offset the costs of revenue sharing at the highest levels of college sports might demand (estimated at around $20.5 million).

Concerts have become increasingly popular in college venues, while one-off evenings like the Bananas are another way to pack the stands.

Neff noted Clemson is in talks with promoters around potential future events.

“We’re not Atlanta. We’re not Charlotte. We’re not gonna have a concert every week in Death Valley, per se,” he said. “But, yeah, the thoughtful use of our facilities for 365 [days per year], this is a first step, or a big step toward that.”

Nothing is ever simple in college sports, particularly its myriad legal issues.

It’s been almost a week since Judge Claudia Wilken released an order essentially telling the NCAA and Power Four conferences, “Phase in roster limits or I’m spiking the House settlement.”

While all indications suggest the conferences and NCAA will, in fact, heed the judge’s warning, there is a world where they don’t, and the House settlement doesn’t receive final approval.

What would that mean for the enterprise? I polled three legal experts who work in and around college sports for their thoughts:

Sam Ehrlich: Boise State assistant professor/legal studies in business, management

“There are a lot of schools that have been operating under a strong assumption that the House settlement will get passed, so if it doesn’t, or even gets delayed until 2026-27, I imagine there will be a lot of questions about what parts of the House settlement the NCAA will try to impose unilaterally and allow schools to get started on their own.

“At the same time, things like the revenue-sharing cap, the third-party NIL restrictions and even maybe the roster limits might not be legal without the cover of the settlement. So, could it lead to more litigation if they try to impose them on their own? Probably!

“I also wonder what happens to the revenue sharing deals with athletes that have been reported as having House settlement approval as a condition precedent. I think/hope that schools have a backup plan in place -- or that they’re at least starting to develop one now that the settlement has been delayed -- but there could be a lot of chaos if the settlement does, in fact, get rejected.”

Mit Winter: Kennyhertz Perry attorney

“We’ll see many schools just move ahead with paying their athletes this summer regardless of whether the House settlement receives final approval. Based on my conversations with schools, that seems to be the general consensus, especially at the [Power Four] level. You don’t need the House settlement to be approved to start doing that. Many state laws or executive orders already contradict NCAA rules and allow schools to directly pay. And even in states without a law like that, there’s really little to no risk of an NCAA compliance issue if you move forward with paying when other schools are doing the same.

“Where things would get interesting is with the salary cap, the restrictions on collectives, and the roster limits. Some conferences might decide they’re going to implement those things at the conference level, where there’s less risk of having antitrust issues. But if they do that, then they run the risk of putting their schools at a disadvantage in recruiting if other conferences don’t impose the same limits and restrictions. And if all conferences, or even just the P4, put in the same limits and restrictions without the protection of the House settlement’s release of claims, then the conferences will likely find themselves involved in another antitrust lawsuit.”

Kelleigh Irwin Fagan: Church Church Hittle & Antrim partner

“I don’t know how you peel back so many things that have happened in terms of direct payments to student athletes, decisions made on roster limits and scholarships. If I’m guessing, there has to be some sort of temporary or interim legislation from an NCAA standpoint that makes some of this permissive.

“On the other hand, though, if it has these restrictions in it, then they’re probably opening themselves up to more potential litigation and eventual trial. But I just can’t see it going back to what it was before July of last year, where now these payments that all of these contracts are being signed for with the transfer portal windows for men’s and women’s basketball and football [that] just concluded [stop]. I don’t know what happens, but I don’t think you can go back to pre-House conditions.”

• Learfield reorganized the leadership team atop its sports properties business, adding Arkansas State AD Jeff Purinton and Paciolan President Deana Barnes as EVPs. The pair will be part of a new four-person EVP team that also includes Learfield staffers Andrew Wheeler and Meghan Heinchon.
• Northwestern signed a multiyear MMR deal with Legends and JMI Sports. The agreement will support new Ryan Field, athletics and the main campus. Legends and JMI partnered on similar ventures at Notre Dame and San Diego State around sponsorships, hospitality, MMR, etc.
• Adidas signed Nebraska QB Dylan Raiola to its college football roster.
• The NCAA’s three Corporate Champions and 16 Corporate Partners combined to earn more than $213.3 million in equivalent media value (EMV) from in-game sponsorship exposures during live telecasts of the 2025 NCAA D-I men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, reports my SBJ colleague David Broughton.
• Broughton also notes that visitors to San Antonio and Tampa during the NCAA basketball Final Four weekend this month helped drive year-over-year tourist-related spending by approximately 3.5% in each city.
• The NCAA picked Genius Sports as its exclusive distributor of official data for NCAA post-season tournaments, writes my SBJ colleague Ethan Joyce. It’s the first time the collegiate governing body will allow its data from championships like March Madness to be available to licensed sportsbooks.