THE PAC 10 TO THE PAC 12

[EPJr]

• Colorado and Utah will join the Arizona and Los Angeles schools — Southern California and UCLA — in a South Division, with the Bay Area schools joining the Oregon and Washington schools in a North Division.


• The inaugural football championship game will be held in the stadium of the highest-seeded division champion.

• The league will have equal revenue sharing, after a threshold is met, with concessions to the Los Angeles schools. According to The Seattle Times, the presidents will approve a proposal giving USC and UCLA $2 million more per year than the other 10 schools until the broadcast revenues reach a certain level, at which point the 12 schools would divide revenues equally.

http://www.denverpost.com/colleges/ci_16382545

The Pac-12 men's basketball TV contract is probably not going to be as highly scrutinized as the Pac-12 football deal, but the developments are just as positive for hoops fans. Here are the bullet point details of the article

•Fox Sports Net will transfer the majority of their basketball telecasts over to ESPN, with 46 in all to be broadcast on ESPN/ESPN2/ESPNU. This means more national telecasts for the conference

•The Thursday/Saturday schedule is no longer set. There will be Wednesday and Sunday games as well to spread out the places, presumably for more national broadcasts.

•The remaining games on regular cable will be shown on FSN networks. I'm not certain if they will be national telecasts, but I'd imagine Commissioner Scott will insist on the majority of these being carried throughout the country rather than regionally.

•The remainder of the games will be on the Pac-12 television and digital networks. All of them. So in some way and some fashion, every game will be available to Pac-12 fans next year.

•The Pac-12 Tournament will split between FOX/FX and ESPN/ESPN2, with FX broadcasting one quarterfinal bracket and a semifinal, and ESPN/ESPN2 taking care of another. The championship game will alternate on a yearly basis between ESPN & FOX.

The Pac-12 will hold its annual men's and women's basketball tournaments in Los Angeles next March, but the conference is seeking bids beyond 2012 and local organizers hope to lure the four-day event to Seattle.

http://www.californiagoldenblogs.com/20 ... spn2-espnu" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[CatMom]

• The inaugural football championship game will be held in the stadium of the highest-seeded division champion.


Bad form. It's not the playoffs, it's a "championship" game.....can you say neutral site?

[SuperHornet]

• The inaugural football championship game will be held in the stadium of the highest-seeded division champion.


Bad form. It's not the playoffs, it's a "championship" game.....can you say neutral site?

I guess they're afraid of the attendance issue. The only "central" place would be Lost Wages, but that market belongs to another league.

[EPJr]

• The inaugural football championship game will be held in the stadium of the highest-seeded division champion.


Bad form. It's not the playoffs, it's a "championship" game.....can you say neutral site?

I have no problem rewarding the best team with home field advantage
it sort of like the first round of the playoffs

[JALMOND]

Bad form. It's not the playoffs, it's a "championship" game.....can you say neutral site?

Not too many places in the Pac-12 area that could be considered a true neutral site. Even the NFL stadiums are in Pac-12 cities, except San Diego (Seattle-UW, San Francisco-Stanford, Oakland-Cal, Phoenix-Arizona State, Denver-Colorado). I guess you could consider Las Vegas, but that stadium is definitely not Pac-12. If they consider Las Vegas, they'd probably have to consider Boise and that's considered fighting words in Pac-12 land. I guess there is also Hawaii to consider...

[Shellin]

I have no problem rewarding the best team with home field advantage
it sort of like the first round of the playoffs

Agreed. Schools in the Pac-10 are just too spread out for a neutral site game to be viable right now. Down the road it might be an option, but I just don't think most Pac-10 fan bases would pony up to fly to LA/Seattle/Denver/etc on a weeks notice when they could wait and fly to LA for the Rose Bowl if their team wins.

[DJH]

West coast schools don't travel worth a crap. A neutral game would not be a success.

[EPJr]

Fox and the Pac-10 announced Thursday the 2011 first-ever Pac-12 football championship game will be televised by Fox on Dec. 3. It will be played at the home of the qualifying team with the best record and will be broadcast at 12:30 p.m. PST.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/sports_ ... n-fox.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[SuperHornet]

Well, a neutral site game makes the MOST sense because it gives the place all year to prepare for the hordes of people expected to show up. But the fact that it's ONE game vice a conference tournament (and for hoops, that's often compounded by being TWO simultaneous tournaments, boys and girls) sort of mitigates the issue to some degree. It becomes just another home game, albeit with a few more people (assuming the road team travels better than they would during the regular season).

Of course,

West coast schools don't travel worth a crap. A neutral game would not be a success.

is germane here. While this might be comparing apples to oranges (both in terms of sports and leagues), before Utah State jumped ship (I think they were forced out, but that's just my opinion) on the Big West, they traveled the best of all the teams, and that included the Orange County teams who were practically right there. Disneyland is probably a distraction, too, given that it's in Anaheim. But DJH is unfortunately correct here.

[clenz]

Wait...what fucking conference runs the mens and womens basketball tournament at the same time?


I'm willing to bet it is a conference/conference that don't matter in the college basketball landscape....they are probably the same conferences that don't play neutral site tournaments

[SuperHornet]

You're jumping to conclusions, clenz.

The Big West has a neutral site tournament in Anaheim, and boys and girls are co-located there. First, it was at the Anaheim Convention Center, a POS if there ever was one. Last year, they moved it to the Pond, so now it's in a nicer place, but the empty seast will be an even bigger eyesore on ESPN2.

A conference that means nothing? It wasn't too long ago that the Big West conference champion took out the Big East champion twice in a row (Providence and Pitt), and it was only luck that saved BC from going home early.