Low bar for next Pac-12 commish
Sports organizations tend to hire the opposite of the person they just fired, or “agrees not to seek a new contract,” as the Pac-12 put it this week when announcing Commissioner Larry Scott would depart this summer, a year before his contract was up.
On the surface, finding the anti-Scott doesn’t seem difficult.
It’s someone willing to make less than $5.5 million a year, fly commercial and be content with office space cheaper than downtown San Francisco, which is pretty much everywhere else.
That doesn’t siphon the applicant pool much, but plenty of other things about the Pac-12 do. It’s a huge conference geographically but in few other ways.
The Pac-12 Network continues to flounder. Revenues lag behind other conferences. Its football teams have fallen behind those in other power five conferences and haven’t been in the College Football Playoff since 2016.
Its “Conference of Champions” brand has become a punchline, right in line behind “Pac-12 officials.”
Oh, and a new commissioner’s priority will be negotiating a media rights deal during a pandemic.
Scott did some good things in his 12year tenure. Starting the Pac-12 Network. Adding Utah and Colorado, which meant a conference football championship game. Moving the conference basketball tournaments to Las Vegas.
But he never connected to the universities that hired him, not to the people who actually work in athletics, anyway.
You don’t develop relationships by arriving for games via private plane and leaving at halftime. Or paying $7 million in rent in downtown San Francisco. Or not resolving the conference’s officiating problems. Or by furloughing half your staff while you collect a hefty bonus.
Scott’s lavishness was a testament to his inability to read the room. He connected with school presidents more than he did athletic directors and coaches.
Of all the perks Scott enjoyed, the one I don’t begrudge him for is the $5.5 million salary.
Overseeing Pac-12 athletics is a big job, and the Bay Area is an expensive place to live.
The conference shouldn’t look for a cheap option in finding Scott’s replacement, although it might behoove them to find one who doesn’t mind flying Southwest or Alaska Air when visiting constituents.
Ray Anderson, Arizona State’s athletic director who has been mentioned by media members as a possible candidate, makes $2.2 million or so a year in actual compensation. If you can trust cost-of-living calculators online, Anderson would need to make $4.6 million
to maintain that standard of living in San Francisco.
Anderson knows the conference and the people in it, in contrast to Scott, who was chairman and CEO of the Women’s Tennis Association before being hired by the Pac-12.
There are numerous other intriguing candidates.
West Coast Conference Commissioner Gloria Nevarez’s resume includes a stint at the Pac-12 and several universities.
Alabama Athletic Director Greg Byrne went to high school in Oregon, graduated from Arizona State and was the athletic director at Arizona from 2010-17. Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith was at ASU from 2000-05. Colorado Athletic Director Rick George, who previously ran business operations for the Texas Rangers, could be a fit, too.
If the Pac-12 wants someone with a deep background in media rights, it could turn to Randy Freer, a former executive with Fox and Hulu.
It’s a daunting job, and some people viewed as quality candidates might not want to take it on.
There are university presidents to keep happy and media rights to negotiate. And at some point, commissioners need to come up with a new model for football, perhaps breaking off power five teams into an organization separate from the NCAA.
Scott was no longer the man for the job. He probably never was.
The good news is that his tenure was like a performance of the beginners’ band at an elementary school concert. Whatever follows is going to sound like a symphony.