RIP Pac-12

If this was purely about academics cal and Stanford are no brainers.

I still think they get in so they can add BTN to Bay Area cable packages. But if they don’t get in I wouldn’t be surprised either.

The Big 10 might take one of them to secure the bay area market.

Stanford has won NCAA championships than any other school, #1 with 134. Cal is #11 overall and more than Michigan at #12.

Academically, Stanford is #4, behind Princeton, MIT and Harvard none of which are know for athletics. Cal is #20. (Per U.S. News).

So, two of the top athletic and academic schools in the U.S. are left behind because of football. And, you know where the top "football" schools stand in terms of other sports and academics.

This entire mess was caused by FOX and ESPN and their TV money. They want most of the PAC-12 schools, but were unwilling to pay them the same money as less prestigious schools which were bette at football.

Yeah the networks don't care in the slightest how many championships you win in sports nobody watches and what your academic rank is. That pride is part of what got the Pac12 in this situation, we claimed this image as a conference about that cared about more than just FB and MBB, rested on our laurels with things that never have and never will pay the bills.

FOX and ESPN behaved exactly as they are incentivized to do and as should be expected of them. Doesn't take a Stanford or Cal degree to predict that.

Nobody wanted Rutgers either, but someone did want the New York City TV market just like someone will want the Bay Area TV market.

I’ve never understood the “get the xxx market” logic with college realignment. If fans there haven’t been watching that team, why would they start just because of a new conference? You can look at the ratings.

It is all about eyeballs for football. The Big 10 Presidents like Cal and Stanford, but from a football dollars perspective they wouldn't pull their weight. Stanford would be invited if Notre Dame came in, but Notre Dame still says they will stay independent. I've read that even UW an UO won't get a full share initially because they aren't projected to be a big draw. If true, that gives an indication of how unappealing Cal and Stanford are.

UA, ASU and Utah will join Colorado in the Big 12.

The potential drop in football revenue for Stanford, Cal, WSU and OSU will kill a lot of non-revenue sports programs (which is where most of Stanford's success resides).

I think it used to matter a lot more to get specific regions when everything was regional cable TV contracts -so get that team your games get played on that regions channels. Now with streaming and the move towards the college conferences being more national than regional brands I can't imagine regional cable deals mattering that much, so it's just do you have a big fan base or not.

Stanford has a $30 billion dollar endowment. Can't they use some of that money to cover the non-revenue sports?

You're joining the Big Ten, and they already have a "UW".

Fans in the New York area were watching Rutgers before it joined the Big Ten just as fans in DC/Baltimore watched Maryland before it joined. Now the viewership in those places adds numbers to overall Big Ten viewership which attracts more advertisers

Stanford could use unrestricted endowment money for non-revenue sports, but I doubt then would. It would eat up a lot of money over time and Stanford already is concerned about the cost of some non-revenue sports.

And think of the costs of those sports if they did join the Big 10 and had multiple trips to the Midwest.

Very sad to see the Pac 12 break apart. Will the Rose Bowl go extinct as well?

I think it's funny to see anyone brag about Stanford's athletic prowess. Their championships are in tennis, rowing, water polo, etc. Zero football championships since WW2, zero men's basketball ever, 2 baseball titles ever. They're not competitive in sports that people care about.

Good point, so what's going to happen with the Rose Bowl matchup?

Really?

Almost every university in America would trade their athletic history for Stanford's, and they would do it so fast your head would spin.

134 National Titles across twenty sports, almost equally divided by gender (70 for men, 64 for women).

At least one new NCAA title every year for 47 consecutive years

Winners of 26 of 29 NACDA Director's Cup Awards

177 Stanford-affiliated athletes have won a total of 296 Summer Olympic Medals

Sure, we can say that they don't win national titles in football, but nobody really wins very many national football titles, other than Alabama, and it is very cyclical. Today's super power in football could suddenly not get a sniff for twenty or thirty years.

doubt it--one of the marquee bowls with a classic setting in Pasadena--it will exist in one way or another--likely it will be a venue for one of the College Playoff games once the field expands next year--I'll miss that Big-10 Pac-10 tradition though!

They already had two U.1989Ms.

You could go undefeated in all those sports, but have a bad to middling football team and still be considered a failure. Football is all anyone cares about.