Larry Scott: Pac-12 in Great Shape

[MiamiBuffs]

Who the hell said NAU? I must've missed that one.

You should ask Nik. I could be wrong but I thought he mentioned them at one point. Or someone else did (here is your out nik)

 

[Buffnik]

You should ask Nik. I could be wrong but I thought he mentioned them at one point. Or someone else did (here is your out nik)

Why would I or anyone else have mentioned NAU?

 

[Big Jim]

Why would I or anyone else have mentioned NAU?

What if they get a new stadium?

 

[Darian3Hagan]

What if they get a new stadium?

Your slip is showing.

 

[8Jah]

So Cal has a lot of people but just like New York there will always be issues trying to gain viewership in that area just due to the people that live there. Yes you could theoretically get the most gains out of that area but it is near impossible to do so.

Ranking TV markets actually gives an exact size of the TV markets and growth has never been an issue for the Pac-12, all of the markets are projected to grow substantially over the next 25 years. There is really no proof that Southern Californians are not watching Pac-12 football at the rate they were before the network, the big games were always on TV and they still are. There is more access to all games everywhere instead of it being on a localized channel it just hasn't been as good as expected. It's not like people in So Cal were able to watch an Arizona-Washington State game before the network anyway without having Dish or DirecTV to get the local channels everywhere.

No matter what conference you are talking about when your second biggest TV market is largely apathetic to college sports and has a school with a small student population it is going to hurt the revenue of the conference. If the bay area cared about sports as much as So Cal the conference would be in way better shape. Couple that with the fact that the 5th biggest market in the conference is the same way and only has one school in that market and it gets even worse.

The Big-10 has massive TV markets that no one in the country can replicate but the SEC and Big-12 still outperform the Pac-12 without them because they have smaller and more engaged markets to go along their top markets which is why Portland and Salt Lake City are so important. A conference with the issues of the Pac-12 cannot focus on one area.

If you want to find a population apathetic to NCAAFB start with our beautiful state of Colorado. After that you can look at Washington, Arizona, Utah and yes, even Oregon. Scary as this may seem, SoCal is historically the LEAST apathetic part of the PAC12 footprint. It is a fact that three of the top five highest TV rating championship games in NCAAFB history involved USC; including the highest TV rated college football game ever played. That was during the BCS era when USC was dominant. Four of the historically top ten TV rated non-championship BCS games involved USC.

During the 2000's ESPN used to shamelessly promote USC (remember how pissed we were) because they understood the power of the LA market. The SoCal market isn't apathetic to NCAAFB, the best way to describe it is fair weathered. NCAA sanctions and the PAC12N inaccessibility in LA killed the momentum, but these things are cyclical. SoCal cares about football (compare the recruiting grounds of metro LA to metro NY city), and SoCal is where almost everybody lives in the West...