The flagship Pac-12 Network, as well as its various regional sister channels, will leave the pay TV programming grid at the end of June (or slightly after), according to a letter sent by distribution partner Charter Communications to its subscribers.

Last week’s Arizona vs. Stanford conference tournament baseball game was the network’s final live broadcast.

The departure marks a sad ending for the erstwhile “Conference of Champions,” with the storied Pac-12 collegiate sports league ultimately disbanding mainly because its TV distribution deals performed so poorly. 

Also read: Pac-12 ADs Spurn Apple Subscription Streaming Deal, Tragically Dismantle the 108-Year-Old ‘Conference of Champions’

Launched in 2012, Pac-12 Network never found its footing, beset by carriage issues almost from its beginning — most notably, a long-running distribution stalemate with DirecTV. 

In December, the regional sports network announced that it would lay off more than 100 employees in the first half of 2024.

And with all but two of its member schools set to depart for rival athletic leagues the Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC in the summer, the Pac-12 conference itself will be down to just Washington State and Oregon State.

With the discontinuation of Pac-12 Networks, denizens of those two remaining schools can watch a selection of Oregon State and Washington State home games on broadcast network The CW. 

The Pac-12 has had to allocate $72 million among its member universities to offset an overpayment made to it by Comcast, not $50 million, as originally reported. 

The revelation was divulged by George Kliavkoff, commissioner of the doomed collegiate athletic conference, amid a suit filed against his organization by two former executives. (The San Jose Mercury News obtained these documents.)

UPDATED: Comcast released a statement to Next TV Monday, indicating that its actual overpayment to the league for Pac-12 Network rights was $50 million over several years. But the accounting conducted by Pac-12 administrators -- who struggled to determine if an overpayment had indeed been rendered, then apparently struggled more to figure out how much to bill each school to handle it -- appears to have made the issue worse. 

This fiscal year, the conference's 12 schools have had to collectively come up with $72 million to fill the gap, not $50 million. 

Brent Willman, former chief financial officer of the Pac-12, and Mark Shuken, former president of Pac-12 Networks, were fired in January, accused of failing to report the overpayment to the league's board of directors when they discovered it back in 2017. 

The pair are suing the league, claiming they did inform former commissioner Larry Scott of the overpayment. Further, they claim it took time to confirm that Comcast did indeed overpay for years to license the Pac-12 Network. And once that was confirmed, since Comcast didn't disclose subscriber data, so it took even more time to determine how much was overpaid.

Pac-12 member schools began collectively making Comcast whole earlier this year, with smaller schools, including Washington State, laying off athletic department employees to balance their budgets.

Also read: Pac-12 ADs Spurn Apple Subscription Streaming Deal, Tragically Dismantle the 108-Year-Old 'Conference of Champions'

With 10 of the Pac-12’s dozen member universities signing contracts to move to other athletic conferences next year, the overpayments issue is yet one more black eye for Scott, whose management of Pac-12 media rights has been broadly condemned for ultimately dooming the conference. 

As Awful Announcing's Joe Lucia noted, not only have Pac-12 athletic directors had to lament that revenue for the Pac-12 regional sports networks never came close to matching even the downside of Scott's projections a decade ago, they have to reconcile with the fact that the checks they did end up cashing were too big. 

Notably, even with the Pac-12 circling the drain, six of the conference's teams occupied spots in the Associated Press top 25 college football rankings Sunday. 

Already reeling with yet another defection, the remaining members of the venerable Pac-12 collegiate athletic conference were unswayed by Commissioner George Kliavkoff's presentation of a new TV deal with Apple last week.

Instead of accepting the long-awaited TV rights deal, the universities of Arizona, Arizona State and Utah chose follow Colorado out the door of the Pac-12 and to the Big 12 conference, starting officially in fall 2024. 

Washington and Oregon, meanwhile, will join the Big Ten next year, along with USC and UCLA, the two schools that set off the Pac-12's death spiral a year ago, when they declared their intention to bolt the conference. 

The remaining Pac-12 schools -- Stanford, California, Washington State and Oregon State -- are still weighing their options. 

Pac-12 football, the revenue-generating edge of the conference's athletic endeavors, will conclude with one final, undoubtedly weepy season, culminating 108 years of proud history, starting in September. 

Just like that, the winningest collegiate athletic conference of them all, with 553 accumulated titles across men's and women's sports, and the former home of iconic athletes spanning Jackie Robinson to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Aaron Rodgers, will be no more. 

The erstwhile "Pac-8," which replaced the "Athletic Association of Western Universities," which had, in turn, subsumed the league's original moniker (the "Pacific Coast Conference," founded in 1915) was home to John Wooden and his legendary "Pyramid of Success." All Wooden did was manifest an astounding 10 men's college basketball championships in 12 years, while once summoning a seemingly unsurpassable 88-game winning streak. 

USC baseball, under coach Rod Dedeaux, won 11 College World Series titles and produced Major League legends including Tom Seaver, Randy Johnson and Mark McGwire.  

USC football has won 11 national championships and produced seven Heisman Trophy winners, including last season's recipient, quarterback Caleb Williams. USC coach John McKay's victories over Bear Bryant's Alabama in the 1960s and '70s are often cited for helping desegregate sports. 

Stanford produced football's John Elway and golf's Tiger Woods. 

Nike founder Phil Knight ran track at Oregon and later outfitted Ducks distance-running legend Steve Prefontaine with his prototype running shoes.

Lisa Fernandez, now the associate head coach for the UCLA softball program she played for more than 30 years ago, was the most dominant pitcher the game has ever known, compiling a crazy-low 0.22 earned run average, a 93-7 record and 784 strikeouts.

The list of luminaries from what UCLA hoops legend turned polarizing broadcaster Bill Walton frequently refers to as "the conference of champions" can be rattled off all day long. 

It's all gone now, swimming with the fishes alongside the WAC and the Big East.  

As Next TV reported last week, the Apple deal would have been a relatively short-term arrangement, kicking off in 2024-25 as a subscription package separate from the Apple TV Plus SVOD service, along the lines of what Apple has done with Major League Soccer.

No financial terms were announced, but the deal's baselines were reported to be far under the guarantees enjoyed by rival collegiate conferences including the Big 12, which beat the Pac-12 to ESPN and Fox's pot of gold last year when it signed a national TV rights extension valued at $2.28 billion.

The Pac-12's Apple deal, ESPN reported, "would grow incrementally based on reaching certain subscription milestones."

Pac-12 athletic director's had heard a similar incentive-laden pitch a decade ago, when the conference, under then commissioner Larry Scott, launched the unwieldy Pac-12 Network regional sports channels. The audience performance never delivered on the revenue promise.

Perhaps more importantly, ESPN and Fox didn't feel the economic imperative to bid against Apple and drive up the Pac-12's TV rights price.

As eloquently detailed by one of college football's most knowledgable pundits, The Athletic's Stewart Mandel, the cause of death for the Pac-12 was the culmination of a dozen years of "hubris, apathy and astounding mismanagement."

The Pac-12's failure wasn't caused by lack of demand.

Mandel writes that it's a "lazy stereotype" to say that West Coasters "don't care" about football -- an assertion that Next TV backs up wholeheartedly. Oregon's Autzun Stadium officially seats 54,000 spectators, but the Ducks averaged 54,950 attendees last season. Defending conference champion Utah also sold out every game.

In years past, Pac-12 schools dominated programs from other conferences on the field.

Consider that from 1970 - 2011, when the Pac-12 signed a then groundbreaking 12-year, $3 billion TV rights deal, the conference had won its semi-annual head-to-head matchup against the Big Ten in the Rose Bowl 25 times vs. just 12 losses.

But throughout the 2010s, the Pac-12's football product suffered. USC, the Pac-12's only true college football "blue blood," was placed on a ruinous probation by the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 2010. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge would later rule that the NCAA's investigation of USC, led by a former University of Miami athletic director Paul Dee, was "malicious."

Fair or unfair, the harsh penalties stemming from former Trojans head coach Pete Carroll's dominant run in the aughts -- which included two national titles, seven straight Pac-12 championships and four straight Rose Bowl victories over the Big Ten -- kneecapped the conference's most successful football program. 

And certainly, the University of Southern California compounded its floundering with a series of bad administrative choices, culminating in only one Rose Bowl win and one conference title over the past 13 years.

Meanwhile, Stanford and Oregon, which surged in the early part of the last decade, "leveled off a bit," as Mandel put it, both coming close to national championships but never quite breaking through. Utah, the conference champion the past two seasons, was ultimately vanquished by Big Ten foes in the Rose Bowl each time.

UCLA, which had once rivaled USC in football success, beating Big Ten foes for three Rose Bowl titles in a four-year span in the 1980s, has underperformed for the past 20 seasons.

More than anything, however, it was former commissioner Scott's failure as a media executive that doomed the Pac-12.

As Pac-12 programs delivered middling results on the field, Scott, a former tennis pro who had headed the Women's Tennis Association, was given carte blanch, based on his initial success, by inattentive conference administrators to build the Pac 12 Networks, which ended up struggling with low ratings and subpar pay TV carriage.

Not only did the Pac-12 Networks fail to deliver nearly as much revenue to member universities vs. their rivals in the Big Ten and SEC, in recent years, the channels became an outright liability.

This season, some Pac-12 school athletic programs are even operating in the red, as they work to pay off a $50 million over-payment made to the RSNs rendered by Comcast years ago, but only recently disclosed.

Scott's reputation further suffered several years ago when the universities of Oklahoma and Texas bolted the Big 12, and the Pac-12 didn't move aggressively to poach that conference's remaining schools.

By that time, rival conferences had zoomed past the Pac-12 in terms of TV revenue.

Pac-12 ADs hoped that Scott's successor, George Kliavkoff, a former NBCUniversal, Hulu and A&E Networks exec who took over the conference's reigns in 2021, would restore order and put the conference on a more competitive TV rights footing.

But the best Kliavkoff could come up with was last week's Apple deal.

ESPN is reporting that earlier this week, Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff presented the conference’s governing body with several offers for the league’s TV and streaming rights when the group’s current television contract expires after this school year. However, the report notes that a “primarily subscription-based Apple streaming deal” was clearly on top of the pile.

The deal is expected to be a relatively short-term contract with Apple kicking off in 2024-25 as a subscription package separate from an Apple TV Plus subscription, along the lines of what Apple has done with Major League Soccer.

While the financial terms were not disclosed, sources said that the renumeration would initially be relatively low compared to the league’s hopes but would grow incrementally based on reaching certain subscription milestones, “and potentially be competitive with its peers in the Big 12 and ACC down the road.”

Also Read: Pac-12 in Talks With The CW on New National TV Rights Deal

With seemingly limitless coffers, Apple has been snapping up major sports streaming rights in recent years. In March 2022, the company acquired the rights to stream Friday Night League Baseball from Major League Baseball.

In June 2022 the company inked a 10-year, $2.5 billion deal to stream Major League Soccer. The company also kicked the tires on NFL Sunday Ticket, but came away empty-handed.

In June, Apple was instrumental in luring Argentinian World Cup soccer megastar Lionel Messi away from a $430 million Saudi Arabian offer to play for Inter Miami, offering the player a percentage of revenue from new MLS Season Pass signups.

However, the Pac-12 offer may be a Hail Mary pass, as the conference is currently facing a bit of a meltdown.

Deadline is reporting that rival college athletics conference the Big Ten is evaluating expansion just as numerous reports suggest that as many as four Pac-12 colleges — Oregon, Washington, Stanford and the University of California — may be ready to jump ship. Just last week Colorado voted to return to the Big 12.

Meanwhile, the Arizona Board of Regents is scheduled to meet Thursday to discuss the fate of Arizona State and Arizona Athletics in light of Colorado’s decision and the uncertainty surrounding Pac-12.

With UCLA and USC set to desert the league in 2024, it’s unclear how much more attrition the league can withstand, or if Apple’s offer is generous enough to entice any of the teams to stay.

The Pac-12 is in talks with The CW to take over the collegiate athletic conference's national TV rights when its current deal with ESPN and Fox expires next year, The Athletic reported. 

Nexstar Media Group, which acquired 75% of The CW last August, continues to pursue live sports following its purchase of LIV Golf TV rights earlier this year. 

The Pac-12, meanwhile, continues to battle through major instability, with top revenue earners USC and UCLA set to bolt to the Big Ten in 2024 and the conference unable to lock in a new national TV deal. 

Aggregating myriad previous reports, The Athletic describes disarray and confusion among top administrators of Pac-12 member schools, who expected league commissioner George Kliavkoff to have hammered out a new TV deal by now ... with someone. 

In February, the New York Post reported on speculation that national Pac-12 TV rights might end up at Apple, but nothing seems to have transpired with that. 

Third and Long

Certainly, Kliavkoff -- who inherited this media rights disaster from Larry Scott -- has his work cut out for him.

First and foremost is the very core stability of the league, with member schools Arizona, Arizona State, Utah and Colorado said to have had recent discussions about bolting to the Big 12, and Oregon and Washington rumored to be possibly joining USC and UCLA in the Big Ten. 

The cause of this instability has been the Pac-12's relatively awful TV revenue situation. In August, for example, the Big Ten announced a seven-year deal to put football and basketball games on CBS, Fox and NBC, netting the league $1 billion per season. This has been viewed as a major reason why USC and UCLA broke century-old ties to the Pac-12 and agreed to regularly put their student athletes on cross-country plane rides to play games in the Big Ten. 

The Pac-12's current 12-year national deal with ESPN and Fox, which runs out in the summer of 2024, pays it just $250 million annually. 

Any hopes of improving upon that rate in renewal were dashed in October, when Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark got the drop on Kliavkoff, negotiating a six-year, $2.28 billion deal with ESPN and Fox. That $360 million-a-year paycheck represented a 73% revenue bump over the Big 12's previous national TV deal, while sating ESPN and Fox to the point at which they're not so eager to pay a premium to re-up the Pac-12.

Putting further pressure on Kliavkoff and the Pac-12 is the fact that the league's linear regional sports network isn't rollin' in the scrilla and flashin' the mad bling-bling, either. 

Launched a decade ago, the Pac-12 network has faced distribution issues from the start -- it's never been able to lock in carriage on DirecTV, for example. And revenue-wise, it only generates a fraction of what RSNs tied to other "Power 5" athletic conferences do.  

Last year, for instance, Pac-12 Networks, which showed 36 conference football games live, about 44% of the league's total games, generated just $30 million for its league members, only around $2.5 million per school. 

So, all told, the Pac-12 is generating less than $300 million a year on media rights. Compare that to the SEC, which made $833 million in 2021. 

The lineup of live TV sports events taking place over the President’s Day weekend starts on the hardwood with TNT’s coverage of the NBA All-Star Weekend festivities.

On Saturday TNT will offer primetime coverage of the NBA All-Star Saturday Night events, including the skills, three-point and slam dunk contests. On Sunday night TNT and TBS will provide live coverage of the annual NBA All-Star Game, featuring the league's recently crowned all-time leading scorer LeBron James.  

On the race track, Fox will feature Sunday afternoon coverage of NASCAR’s Daytona 500 auto racing event. On the links, CBS and Golf Channel will offer weekend coverage of the PGA Genesis Invitational golf tournament. 

The men’s college basketball lineup of top-ranked teams playing on Saturday includes top-ranked Alabama meeting Georgia on the SEC Network, fourth-ranked UCLA battling California on the Pac-12 Network and fifth-ranked Kansas taking on ninth-ranked Baylor on ESPN. On Sunday, second-ranked Houston plays Memphis on ESPN, while third-ranked Purdue meets Ohio State on CBS.

Several of the top women’s college basketball teams play on Sunday, including top-ranked South Carolina meeting Ole Miss on SEC Network, second-ranked Indiana battling Purdue on BTN, and fifth-ranked LSU traveling to Florida on SEC Network.  On Monday, third-ranked Stanford plays No. 16 UCLA on ESPN2.

On the ice, ABC will televise the NHL's Stadium Series outdoor game between the Washington Capitals and the Carolina Hurricanes from Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh, North Carolina. 

In the boxing ring, PPV.com on Saturday will distribute the BLK Prime-produced fight between former four-division champion Adrien Broner and Michael Williams Jr., while DAZN will distribute the WBA featherweight title bout between champion Leigh Wood and challenger Mauricio Lara.  

ESPN and ABC on Saturday will kickoff the inaugural season of the upstart XFL pro football league. ABC will offer the Vegas Vipers-Arlington Renegades game while ESPN and FX will simulcast the primetime matchup between the Orlando Guardians and the Houston Roughnecks. 

Also: Disney Looking to Expand XFL Sponsor Roster as Season Kicks Off

On Sunday, XFL game telecasts include the St. Louis Battlehawks-San Antonio Brahmas contest on ABC and the Seattle Sea Dragons-D.C. Defenders matchup on ESPN.■ 

The Pac 12 Conference has hired former MGM Resorts and Hearst executive George Kliavkoff as its new commissioner, effective July 1.

The five-year agreement calls for Kliavkoff, 54, to oversee all operations of the 12-team conference. Kliavkoff replaces former commissioner Larry Scott, who had served as commissioner since 2009. 

Kliavkoff joins the Pac-12 from MGM Resorts International, where he served as president of entertainment and sports. He also has an extensive background in entertainment, having served at Hearst Entertainment & Syndication overseeing Hearst’s interests in cable television networks, including ESPN, A&E, Lifetime and History. 

Read also: Sports and OTT: Streaming Could Squeeze the Last Vestige of Appointment TV

Kliavkoff also held the chief digital officer position at NBCUniversal,  and led the company’s partnership with News Corp to incubate and launch the Hulu streaming service, where he also served as interim CEO. Prior to NBCU, Kliavkoff was executive vice president of business for Major League Baseball Advanced Media. 

“At each step of his career, George has navigated complex, quickly changing environments and has been a successful consensus builder,”  said University of Oregon President Michael Schill, chairman of the five-member search committee that selected Kliavkoff statement. “George is a visionary leader with an extraordinary background as a pioneering sports, entertainment and digital media executive, and we are delighted and honored that he has agreed to become our next Pac-12 Commissioner.”

College football takes the field this weekend at full strength as the PAC-12 kicks off its 2020 season, highlighting a busy TV sports weekend.  

The college football schedule is led by NBC’s primetime matchup between top-ranked Clemson and fourth-ranked Notre Dame. The Tigers will be without its star quarterback Trevor Lawrence for a second straight game due to a positive COVID-19 test.

The Pac-12 on Saturday gets back on the field for the first time this season with Arizona State facing off against 20th-ranked USC on Fox. The conference last month approved a seven-game schedule after initially cancelling the season this past summer due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The conference however, has already canceled two games this weekend -- Washington-California and Arizona-Utah -- due to pandemic concerns.

Other big college football matchups include fifth-ranked Georgia at eight-ranked Florida on CBS and No.7 Texas A&M at South Carolina on ESPN.

DAZN will jump into the boxing ring Saturday night with a lightweight fight between top contender Devin Haney and former world champion Yuriorkis Gamboa. 

On Sunday NBC will telecast NASCAR’s The Season Finale event, the final race of the 2020 season from Phoenix Raceway. 

The NFL enters its 9th regular season week with a full slate of games leading up to NBC’s Sunday Night Football game featuring veteran quarterbacks Drew Brees of the New Orleans Saints against Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

In other sports, horse racing’s Breeders’ Cup takes place on Nov. 6 and Nov. 7 on NBCSN. 

 The Big Ten Conference said Wednesday it will now play its 2020 season beginning in October, nearly a month after initially announcing it would postpone all fall athletics to 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The 14-team Big Ten will begin an eight-game season the weekend of Oct. 24, with a Big Ten championship game set for Dec. 19, said officials from the conference, which includes such teams as Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State and Penn State. Players and coaches will be required to undergo daily antigen testing, with results needing to be completed and reported prior to each practice and game, according to bigten.org

The decision comes more than a month after the conference officially  postpone its fall sports program, including its college football schedule, due to the pandemic.

The Big 10’s move leaves the Pac-12 as the only "Power Five" conference not playing football this fall. Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott said Wednesday the conference is not planning to return to the field in the near future. 

"At this time, our universities in California and Oregon do not have approval from state or local public health officials to start contact practice,” Scott said in a statement. “We are hopeful that our new daily testing capability can help satisfy public health approvals in California and Oregon to begin contact practices and competition. We are equally closely monitoring the devastating fires and air quality throughout our region at this time. We are eager for our student-athletes to have the opportunity to play this season, as soon as it can be done safely and in accordance with public health authority approvals." 

The Pac-12 Conference Tuesday announced it will postpone all sports competitions, including college football, through the end of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The decision comes hours after the Big 10 announced its decision to cancel all Fall sports events until at least Spring 2021. The Pac-12 and Big 10 Conferences are part of the Power Five conferences that hold major influence over college sports. It is unclear what the remaining conferences -- Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) Big-12, and Southeastern Conference-- will follow the Big 10 and Pac-12 conferences in cancelling all Fall sports. 

The Pac-12 conference includes such schools as Arizona, UCLA, USC, and Oregon State. 

“The health, safety and well-being of our student-athletes and all those connected to Pac-12 sports has been our number one priority since the start of this current crisis,” said Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott in a statement. “Our student-athletes, fans, staff and all those who love college sports would like to have seen the season played this calendar year as originally planned, and we know how disappointing this is.”

Related: Big Ten Conference Postpones College Football Season

The Pac-12 Conference and SiriusXM have inked a multiyear deal to create SiriusXM Pac-12 Radio, a new channel that will debut in early 2018.

The exclusive 24/7 radio channel, the first dedicated to the Pac-12, will feature live Pac-12 games, and original talk programming, including live call-in shows. It will also include college coaches shows, coverage of press conferences, classic Pac-12 game broadcasts, coverage of Pac-12 media days and curated highlights from the conference.

The new channel will be available to SiriusXM subs via the service’s own app, as well as on several connected platforms, including smart TVs, Amazon Alexa devices, Apple TV boxes, PlayStation consumers and Roku boxes, and select SiriusXM Satellite radios on channel 373.

Pac-12 noted that the new radio deal with SiriusXM follows other recent digital-focused distribution deals with fuboTV and CenturyLink Stream, two nationally-delivered OTT TV services.