Bear Down Wildcats

So far I like in general what Kliavkoff is saying on multiple issues. Anybody is better than Larry Scott. He's starting his road tour of all the campus in the next few months and will be at AZ at some point meeting with our constituents.

And while I think he's a great hire, and is going to move the conference forward correctly on key developments in terms of media rights, realignment, officiating, focusing on football, etc. there's two points he's made so far that's he's missed the mark on. He's new, and not sure he fully 100% gets the Pac-12s specific issues, yet. On the two issues he's most naive currently on:

#1. He stated that any college football expansion doesn't necessarily need to include an automatic bid for the Pac-12. That's completely ignoring one of the PAC12s biggest challenges and long-standing issues, the extreme east coast, Big 10 and SEC media bias towards those teams, at the exclusion of the PAC12. Very few of those voting in national polls the playoffs are based on, and the pundits who anchor fans' opinions, even watch PAC12 games. Every single year they seem to throw in a token PAC12 team in the top rankings just 'cause they feel they have to, and then when our one and only top 10 ranked team loses a single game, we're fully out and completely eliminated from all further playoff talk the rest of the season. Meanwhile, if an SEC team loses two games, it's all about what a tough schedule they play and even a 3 loss team should possibly get in.

With the SEC expanding to 16 teams, ESPN (which owns the SEC network), and the Big 10 will create a media lock on the rankings and have their teams ranked 1-12 every year and will exclude the PAC. So he needs to wisen up there on the bias the PAC12 faces. We saw this year in the NCAA bball tourney, just give the PAC a chance with more than a couple teams and we can compete and reach the final 4 like all the other conferences, but each year we're told we only deserve like 2, maybe three if they're being generous.

#2: He stated at PAC12 media days that on the NIL issue, he's fully expecting Congress to enact some sort of national NIL legislation to regulate NIL inducements to play for a particular school, or pay for play schemes. That's just simply not going to happen, or at the least extremely unlikely. Congress can't get it's act together on something so vast and complicated. Right now everyone is talking about the NCAA having no role, and as an organization it completely screwed up not leading the charge on NIL regulation. The NCAA exists because all the colleges wanted one organizational structure to police its members so all teams compete on an even playing field, as much as that is realistically possible. If the NCAA is to survive, its key role will still be in its country-wide enforcement of agreed to rules on pay for play that's coming, some mechanism to regulate that fairly among all colleges. Otherwise, there is simply no stopping rich donors, even fans banding together to pay high school recruits $5 million dollars is supposed marketing deals to come play at their school. If fans and the schools think pay for play is ok, then so be it, but otherwise it's just professional free agency without any salary cap. If the NCAA isn't going to survive as a regulating entity, then conferences like the PAC12 will need to lead the charge with other conferences in creating some uniform rules. But putting all your eggs in the United States Congress to do something is really not addressing the soon to be here problem.

So we do risk falling further behind other conferences if he thinks these outside agencies and media are going to help the PAC12 in any way, or trust them to do the right thing. They won't. Otherwise, feel good about the new direction the conference is going in.