What's new
AllBuffs | Unofficial fan site for the University of Colorado at Boulder Athletics programs

This is a sample guest message. Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

  • Prime Time. Prime Time. Its a new era for Colorado football. Consider signing up for a club membership! For $20/year, you can get access to all the special features at Allbuffs, including club member only forums, dark mode, avatars and best of all no ads ! But seriously, please sign up so that we can pay the bills. No one earns money here, and we can use your $20 to keep this hellhole running. You can sign up for a club membership by navigating to your account in the upper right and clicking on "Account Upgrades". Make it happen!

Pac-12 Network is restructuring

The lack of foresight was three-fold:

-Conference realignment was even close to being finished. His clumsily pitched Oklahoma/Oklahoma State to get to 14. Admittedly not a bad option, but that was it with other conferences going to 14?

-Uh yeah, the money kinda matters in this case. Just shrugging your shoulders and not anticipating what the other conferences were going to get only a few short years later is not an argument.

-Not understanding the extreme value or lack thereof for a conference network not having national distribution. The "we will get that resolved later" strategy has failed miserably.

Apparently we are not allowed to evaluate his tenure on 2018 conditions. Much better to rely on what the outlook was supposed to be in 2011.

He was extended in March of 2017 until 2022. They could have let him walk pretty easily. Apparently your evaluation failed to sway the other board members. Sorry.

Guessing the future is a difficult thing. I can tell you the stock market will go up more than it will go down. And that no hedge fund managers are able to consistently beat the little old S&P500. I can not tell you which stocks to buy and I would have already bought them if I did. I did point out more than once that DirecTV was not a stock that I would buy or own because of its lack of growth well before the cord cutting phenomenon started and forced them into the arms of AT&T. I'd say the same about Dish except that Charlie is very good businessman. At least Comcast et al can offer broad band and phone service in addition to cable. But they cant go nationwide easily.

Lots of smart people, smarter than Larry Scott, work on Wall Street trying to figure out how to make money. Nearly all of them missed 2007 2008. You seem very intent on punishing him because he misread the tea leaves on the television industry future. He only had one other example to follow and decided to go for full ownership. He made a bet on his negotiating skills and he was wrong. Wrong in the sense that were just not earning as much off our channel as the others, but were still earning.

I cant speak to the other things you bring up. I suspect there was a lot going on in the board rooms at OU, OSU, UT, and their various legislatures boosters governors and power players that would never make any of those deals a slam dunk. They are all in the end culturally aligned with each other. We were always the odd duck in that conference. So the move west was easier for us than for them. We stuck with those bozos on the Pac's first flirtation with us. We bailed because UT gave us plenty of reason to leave.
 
Last edited:
I seem intent on punishing him for not doing a good enough job of delivering revenue and exposure other P5 conferences enjoy? Very perceptive of you.
 
You guys know a lot more about the TV Sports business than I do. And a lot more about the business side of college football than I do, too. My simplistic take is that, while I'm not in love with the conference we're in, I can turn on my XFinity-bound TV most fall weekends and see a Buff game for free. Other than my XFinity bill, which I'd have regardless. Just think about the pioneers crossing the prairies in ....oh, never mind. Life is good.
 
The PAC12 network is delivering seriously less revenue than the SEC and the Big 10 counterparts. The Big 10 schools are receiving about $19 million MORE per school per year from their TV contracts than the Pac 12. This means the Big 10 schools will have almost $100 million more in their war chest after 5 years. It will be hard to compete. Here is the big problem - the PAC12 is on a path and they cannot get off until the present contracts expire. They are hoping that owning 100% of their content has great value in 2024 - and no one knows the answer to that. The media and distribution business is changing too fast to predict the future so hold tight for the next 5 years when new contracts will be negotiated.
 
The PAC12 network is delivering seriously less revenue than the SEC and the Big 10 counterparts. The Big 10 schools are receiving about $19 million MORE per school per year from their TV contracts than the Pac 12. This means the Big 10 schools will have almost $100 million more in their war chest after 5 years. It will be hard to compete. Here is the big problem - the PAC12 is on a path and they cannot get off until the present contracts expire. They are hoping that owning 100% of their content has great value in 2024 - and no one knows the answer to that. The media and distribution business is changing too fast to predict the future so hold tight for the next 5 years when new contracts will be negotiated.
The thing that really emphasizes to me how poorly the Pac-12 is performing on media:

We're getting 100% of revenues instead of 51%, splitting the pie 12 ways instead of 14... and we're still on track to start bringing in half as much revenue per school.

That's horrible.
 
The PAC12 network is delivering seriously less revenue than the SEC and the Big 10 counterparts. The Big 10 schools are receiving about $19 million MORE per school per year from their TV contracts than the Pac 12. This means the Big 10 schools will have almost $100 million more in their war chest after 5 years. It will be hard to compete. Here is the big problem - the PAC12 is on a path and they cannot get off until the present contracts expire. They are hoping that owning 100% of their content has great value in 2024 - and no one knows the answer to that. The media and distribution business is changing too fast to predict the future so hold tight for the next 5 years when new contracts will be negotiated.

If you're making an argument that we might be better off in another conference, I couldn't agree more.
 
Which one? The B1G, where we have no history or interest in anyone outside Nebraska? Or go back to the Big XII?

The revenue is a problem. But I love the PAC. We fit here, and our alumni are here.
 
Which one? The B1G, where we have no history or interest in anyone outside Nebraska? Or go back to the Big XII?

The revenue is a problem. But I love the PAC. We fit here, and our alumni are here.
 
Officiating is an issue in at some level in every conference, it' just the PAC12 is at a level of officiating all to their own. As in, super-high levels on the inconsistency and inaccuracy meter.

The money battle is a problem though.
Fify
 
Which one? The B1G, where we have no history or interest in anyone outside Nebraska? Or go back to the Big XII?

The revenue is a problem. But I love the PAC. We fit here, and our alumni are here.

It could be that my opinion here is colored by my age/era of CU attendance. When I was in Boulder, quite a while ago, there were tons of kids from Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey, etc. Never met too many folks from the west coast. Hopefully these CA alumni are donors and/or buy tickets to our road games. One of my generic observations about the PAC 12 is that the interest in college football, especially among the CA teams, is not rabid. Just my impression.
 
It could be that my opinion here is colored by my age/era of CU attendance. When I was in Boulder, quite a while ago, there were tons of kids from Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey, etc. Never met too many folks from the west coast. Hopefully these CA alumni are donors and/or buy tickets to our road games. One of my generic observations about the PAC 12 is that the interest in college football, especially among the CA teams, is not rabid. Just my impression.
It's well documented that the majority of our alumni live in the west, with California by far being the #2 state students come from. I agree the PAC fans in general are not as die-hard as those in other parts of the country, and it doesn't actually bother me - even when I was in Boulder, if the team sucked and the weather was great and a nearby 14er was calling my name.... well, I had to think about it at least. So it is with much of the PAC - moreso than any other conference, we have amazing things to do at our back door. Nonetheless, though smaller, I think the fans of Oregon, Washington, and Utah are some of the more passionate fan bases in the country, and other locations are pretty damn incredible when the team gives the fans a bit of reason for hope, CU included.
 
Officiating is an issue in every conference, not just the PAC12.

The money battle is a problem though.

Officiating is particularly bad in the Pac-12 though. It is a nationally recognized problem too which is not getting any better. Brushing it off helps no one.
 
Officiating is particularly bad in the Pac-12 though. It is a nationally recognized problem too which is not getting any better. Brushing it off helps no one.
I think the reputation (which was earned) feeds a lot of that narrative these days. As someone who watches a ton of college football, I don't find the Pac-12 refs worse than others. Different emphasis on some things like targeting, but I'm ok with those types of differences. I am, however, bothered by Pac-12 basketball officiating. There doesn't seem to be a vision as a conference on how it wants games refereed and the swings from one crew to the next are huge. That hurts with identity. I know what "Big Ten basketball" means with physical play and whatnot. I have no idea what "Pac-12 basketball" means.
 
I think the reputation (which was earned) feeds a lot of that narrative these days. As someone who watches a ton of college football, I don't find the Pac-12 refs worse than others. Different emphasis on some things like targeting, but I'm ok with those types of differences. I am, however, bothered by Pac-12 basketball officiating. There doesn't seem to be a vision as a conference on how it wants games refereed and the swings from one crew to the next are huge. That hurts with identity. I know what "Big Ten basketball" means with physical play and whatnot. I have no idea what "Pac-12 basketball" means.

I think the review process for football in the Pac-12 is really clunky.
 
Alright. So the CU WBB game is not on PACN national channel. Fine. They've got to select a game for the time slot and we didn't get it this time. So I was able to go to Pac-12.com, identify that I'm a Comcast Xfinity subscriber, and I got free access to stream it. Simple, convenient. No problem.

My question becomes why it's not possible to pay PACN directly for this access or download & use the App (LINK) unless I subscribe to one of the providers? This needs to get fixed when the current media contract expires in 4 years. I see no purpose for my Pac-12 Mountain channel and it is ridiculous that I can't buy the network directly if I don't live in an area where providers don't have the channel or I have chosen to cut the cord.
 
Alright. So the CU WBB game is not on PACN national channel. Fine. They've got to select a game for the time slot and we didn't get it this time. So I was able to go to Pac-12.com, identify that I'm a Comcast Xfinity subscriber, and I got free access to stream it. Simple, convenient. No problem.

My question becomes why it's not possible to pay PACN directly for this access or download & use the App (LINK) unless I subscribe to one of the providers? This needs to get fixed when the current media contract expires in 4 years. I see no purpose for my Pac-12 Mountain channel and it is ridiculous that I can't buy the network directly if I don't live in an area where providers don't have the channel or I have chosen to cut the cord.

If your the provider (dish, xfinity) why carry the channel at all if the customer can go right around you?

I think what really probably happens is that a piece of the Pac12 Network is sold as part of the deal to our next partner. At which point my guess is they will cut back on the cost of covering all those sports we have and probably reduce the number of channels.
 
Back
Top