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Message: [QUOTE="jostar1, post: 4706488, member: 1737"] [B]Canzano: Things and thoughts for your Saturday[/B] JOHN CANZANO JUL 29 — The Pac-12 held a one-hour zoom call with presidents, chancellors and the nine remaining ADs on Thursday at 5 p.m.. What was the tone? How did it go? I asked one of the athletic directors on the call. “Meeting was fine. I think we are pretty solid,” the person said. “Waiting to early next week. League needs to deliver something soon and good. Excellent communication between ADs. Seems we are strongly committed to wait and see the deals.” The “early next week” part jumped out to me. — Colorado’s departure to the Big 12 doesn’t help move things along quickly or make that wait easy. I asked the same AD source how the current economic climate in the media world is affecting the Pac-12’s negotiation. How much, if any, of the delay is on Commissioner George Kliavkoff? The slow-moving presidents/chancellors? Other factors? “Just taking far too long,” the source said. “But the climate is terrible. And peers from other conferences are trying to take the league. Along with (Fox) trying to own it all. Not healthy.” — Fox has USC and UCLA as part of its Big Ten contract and also has the Mountain West Conference. The network doesn’t “own it all” but it has a foothold in the Pacific time zone. It isn’t motivated to help the Pac-12 get a good deal. In fact, you could argue that Fox benefits from the destabilization of the Pac-12 (see: USC, UCLA, Colorado). I’ve been told, on and off during the last six months, that Fox was still at the table with the Pac-12. How aggressively? Not sure. I’ve wondered if the network wants anything more than a few FS1 Thursday/Friday games, if that. Meanwhile, ESPN currently doesn’t have anything west of the Big 12 footprint when it comes to college football. It needs the 10:30 p.m. ET window filled and the Pac-12 offers that. Also, Apple remains a potential partner. I wonder if Apple would just take an equity stake in ESPN and gobble up the entire Pac-12 package in one giant linear/streaming bite. I had a Pac-12 CEO Group source tell me two weeks ago “it will be worth the wait.” I don’t think the person was blowing smoke. But that ‘wait’ needs to end soon. How’s next week for everyone? Work for you? — I’ve been thinking a lot about the health of the ecosystem and the role that television plays in it. College football essentially shut out the entire Pacific Time Zone with the four-team playoff. The playoff expansion to 12 teams elicited cheers from a lot of college fans, but most notably those in the Pacific Time zone. Last October in a podcast conversation with SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, I asked about whether the major conferences care about the health of the landscape. Sankey said: “If the College Football Playoff stayed at four, we’d be fine given what’s happened since it was implemented. That is not the perspective offered by everyone else over time. One of the motivating factors from our perspective is the need for football to be relevant on a national basis. “That’s important for us all.” — Is the regional health of college football important to media companies? You’d think so. They do lucrative business in the space. But the companies also have shareholders, profits to worry about and a fiduciary duty to generate a pile of revenue. I know lots of good, smart, conscientious people who work in the media-rights world, but it doesn’t feel like a holistic game right now. It looks more like pirates playing a game of chess. [/QUOTE]

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