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.
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.
