Pac-12 presidents, athletic directors and conference executives will gather Monday at Arizona State for a quarterly meeting that is anything but routine.
Momentous topics are on the agenda, including what a source called an “important update” on the media rights negotiations that will help define the future of the conference.
Commissioner George Kliavkoff has been working with potential broadcast partners for months to construct an agreement that satisfies the desire for both revenue and visibility.
Negotiations are expected to conclude in the next four-to-six weeks. But if talks with ESPN, Amazon, Fox and other media companies extend deep into the spring, campus officials could become anxious, lose faith in the process and explore alternatives.
(It is not known whether the presidents will discuss expansion options. At a formal level, that step won’t take place until the schools agree to a media deal and sign a grant-of-rights agreement that binds their media revenue to the conference.)
Kliavkoff is also expected to brief the presidents on the conference’s financial outlook, the ongoing transformation of the NCAA constitution and matters involving the Pac-12 Networks.
The conference recently fired two executives, CFO Brent Willman and Pac-12 Networks president Mark Shuken, for failing to properly address yearly overpayments by Comcast that are believed to total about $50 million.
(Sources expect Comcast to eventually withhold distributions to the Pac-12 in an amount equal to the overpayment total.)
The athletic directors will participate in a strategy session Monday, but a portion of the meeting will feature only conference executives and the presidents.
In past years, campus officials have gathered in Las Vegas at the Pac-12 basketball tournament, then again in May. In order to spread out the quarterly meetings, Kliavkoff moved the March event to late January.
Officials for USC and UCLA are expected to take part in discussions about current conference affairs but not conversations about the strategic matters involving the future of the league.
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