Have you ever seen the movie Margin Call? The boardroom scene with Jeremy Irons is brilliant. I can't find a short clip of it right now, but in the scene, he says there are three ways to make money in their business, be first, be smarter, or cheat. Then he goes on to say that being first is the easiest. Put another way, it is not a panic move if you are right.
In this case, if the Pac 12 was really falling apart, every school would be racing for the doors to be the first to get a new conference home. See the Big East in 2002 or 2012 if you want to see what this looks like. Yet the Pac 12 members are not budging. So either they have a media deal in hand, or they are engaging in one of the most monumentally stupid bluffs in the history of media sales. But if they were bluffing, you would think one of the members would bolt for the door to be first.
I personally think it is a great time to be a content seller, and if ESPN or someone else is playing hardball with the Pac 12, then the right move is to be patient, as long as they think they have something in hand.
All these sports reporters ripping the Pac 12 on twitter are effectively saying that not only do they know more than Kliavkoff, but they also know more than the administrations at every Pac 12 member. If I have to choose between the administrations of Stanford and Cal, or a bunch of sports reporters that are lucky if they graduated from Syracuse, I have a hard time siding with the sports reporters. The fact that the reporters can't do the same analysis I just did and reach a similar conclusion means that they should stick to asking coaches why they won or lost the last game and leave business reporting to people who understand business.
