“The Pac-12 has not called or contacted a single president or AD or any other affiliated person with any Big12 school in the last week and we have not returned any such calls, recognizing the potential larger value to our members of a prospective collaboration with Big12 that increases our competitiveness on the national landscape.” “We want to work in good faith to see if there is value we can create together, but the certainty of each of our current memberships is essential to the potential value of any prospective collaboration,” he wrote. It was important to communicate to the Big 12 that transparency and good faith were paramount, Kliavkoff wrote. Kliavkoff mentioned that he had informed Yormark that he also had spoken with the ACC, “and the ACC commissioner knows that we are talking to the Big12.” “We are open to discussing a strategic relationship with the Big12 that could help both Conferences and we have no preconceived notions about what would be possible or not we think it is worth exploring,” Kliavkoff wrote to the two Pac-12 presidents. In that email, Kliavkoff outlined his messaging strategy for a Zoom meeting scheduled for the following day with Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark, Texas Tech president and Big 12 board of directors chair Lawrence Schovanec and Kevin Sweeney, the Big 12’s longtime outside general counsel. He seemed more open-minded in an email sent July 7 - one week after the USC-UCLA news broke - to Ana Mari Cauce, president of the University of Washington and the new chair of the Pac-12’s executive committee, and Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, another executive committee member. Kliavkoff offered a different version of those events later that month, telling The Athletic at Pac-12 media day: “The Big 12 asked whether we would be interested in merging, and we explained to them the financial reasons and the contractual reasons related to existing media deals that would make it impossible for us to merge with them.” A partnership between the Pac-12 and Big 12 didn’t materialize, and the public tenor between the two conference commissioners grew sour in late July.Ī July 18 report by ESPN indicated that the leagues had decided against partnering, a decision framed as the Big 12 informing the Pac-12 that it wasn’t interested.The Big 12 is losing Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC as early as 2024.The June 30 decision by USC and UCLA to leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten in 2024 sent the Pac-12 scrambling to secure its future as a conference.
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Before the Pac-12 and Big 12 engaged in a public feud regarding the most recent round of college football expansion - and whether it might include one conference poaching teams from the other - Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff was intrigued by the possibility of partnering with the Big 12, according to an email obtained via public records request by The Athletic.
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