Vannini: Losing Colorado is a blow, but Pac-12’s future will depend on Arizona schools

It was always going to be Colorado first. But that doesn’t mean anything else is happening. Not yet.

Colorado’s decision to leave the Pac-12 for the Big 12 is a notable move but not a surprising one. Whispers about the Buffs’ interest in the Big 12 have been around for a year, far more than other schools. Also over that year, fans and pundits have declared the death of the Pac-12. The league’s complete fumbling of a media rights negotiation thus far has greatly added to that.

But we haven’t passed the inflection point. Not yet. The actual fulcrum was always going to be the Arizona schools. And at this point, they’re still waiting for that Pac-12 TV number.

“All I keep saying is, you know, we’re just waiting to get a deal,” Arizona president Robert C. Robbins told The Athletic’s Max Olson. “And then everybody has to evaluate the deal on its merits. I’ve been pretty steadfast in that stance.”

The Pac-12 can survive without Colorado. As much as “survive” means in the short term these days. The real question about whether the league collapses is in the hands of Arizona and Arizona State.

If the media rights deal finally comes together and it’s enough for the Arizona schools to stay, the Pac-12 will hang around until the next round of media rights negotiations. (We all know Oregon and Washington want to join the Big Ten, but the league continues to indicate that’s not happening anytime soon.) If the Arizona schools leave, then everyone panics and anything can happen.

But if the Pac-12 sticks together and simply replaces Colorado with San Diego State in 2025 or 2026, are we sure that’s not an upgrade? It certainly is on the field. SDSU has been a better football program for a decade and a much better basketball program, having reached the national championship game in April. Colorado finished 61st in the Directors Cup standings in 2022-23 while SDSU finished 86th. That’s not a large difference, especially considering the resources and the major sports.

This is how bizarre realignment has become: The Pac-12 school picked to finish last in the conference this season is making a Power 5-to-Power 5 move. The Buffs football program has won seven games once in the last 17 years. USC and UCLA, this is not.

It’s all about “stability” and stability these days outside the Big Ten and SEC means nobody else wants your schools. The Pac-12 is unstable because the Big Ten wanted USC and UCLA and it has valuable properties in Oregon and Washington. The ACC is unstable because schools like Clemson, Florida State and others are worried about falling further behind the Power 2 while stuck in a TV deal through 2036. The Big 12 is stable because everyone’s about equal and the Power 2 didn’t want those schools.

The Pac-12’s inability to absorb and destroy the Big 12 in 2010 and refusal to try in 2021 is what put the conference in this dire position. Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark realized immediately that this town wasn’t big enough for the two of them, so the Big 12 quickly jumped into a renegotiated television deal for the sake of stability and put the Pac-12 on its heels. It worked. The Pac-12’s hubris and lack of foresight from leadership across multiple commissioners led it to fall further and further behind before it even realized it. And it turned out this became the absolute worst possible time to negotiate a new TV deal.

But Colorado was also different from the rest of the Pac-12 because it, of course, was previously a member of the Big 12, when it actually found periodic success in the major sports (and the Big 8 before that). As soon as Colorado left for the Pac-12 in 2010, it lost a key recruiting pipeline to Texas and never made up for it in California and out West.

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The Pac-12 missed its chance to be at the forefront of a changing landscape

Prying the Arizona schools was always going to be harder because there are longstanding relationships with the Pac-12 that go back to the 1970s. I’ve talked to administrators at Colorado and Arizona. They didn’t and don’t want to leave the conference, but the lack of clarity on the media rights deal forced their hands. Utah remains incredibly grateful the Pac-12 invited the Utes to Power 5 status, too.

It feels foolish to say the Pac-12 can still salvage this, after everything that’s happened in the past year, all the blown informal deadlines, all the big talk that hasn’t produced anything. The longer this dragged out, the less reason there was for optimism — if there was a good TV to be had, it would’ve been had already.

For commissioner George Kliavkoff to say in Las Vegas that he had no concern about anyone leaving for the Big 12 and then to see it happen one week later is just the latest bad look in a long string of them. It’s not hard to lack faith in the Pac-12 keeping this together.

But it’s still together right now, and Colorado’s decision was never going to change that. It’s the next step that either keeps everyone together or spins us off into another branch of conference realignment.

(Photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)