ASU’s Crow says Pac-12 positioned for ‘greatness’
In a season of widespread discontent about the Pac-12 — be it leadership, financial health or on-field performance — Arizona State President Michael Crow preaches patience and perspective.
If Crow was delivering a sermon on the Pac-12, it would be out of Ecclesiastes 3. To everything there is a season ... a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.
Except Crow is not among the growing crowd that wants to cast out 10th-year Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott.
Crow was chair of the Pac-12 CEO group when Scott was hired in summer 2009 and one of only three Pac-10 presidents/chancellors then who are still around among the 12 today. The two others are UCLA’s Gene Block and Oregon State’s Ed Ray.
Scott’s contract has been extended twice, most recently through June 2022. He earned a reported $4.8 million in 2016, highest among all college sports
commissioners, a salary drawing scrutiny because of Pac-12 expenses at its San Francisco headquarters and the gap between what the conference is delivering to its members vs. payouts from other Power 5 conferences.
The Pac-12 annual distribution to each of its schools is $31 million compared to $41 million per school in the SEC and $50 million in the Big Ten thanks to a new television contract. The Pac-12’s media rights deals with ESPN and Fox expire after the 2023-24 school year, creating an income gap until then that leaves the conference — fighting to keep up in football and men’s basketball — at a financial disadvantage for another five school years after 2018-19.
The Pac-12 also has hired a high profile public relations firm, FleishmanHillard, to help improve the image of a conference rocked in September by an instant replay officiating controversy. There’s also the performance image problem from the Pac-12 reaching the College Football Playoff just twice in five years and currently having no men’s basketball teams ranked in the AP top 25 or among the top 50 in the new Net rankings.
When asked if he remains solidly supportive of Scott, Crow simply says yes without further elaboration. But the 63year-old is expansive in his other answers about the Pac-12 and ASU athletics in a recent interview with azcentral sports.
Criticism of Pac-12
“To some extent, I don’t really understand it. What I mean by that is when I came here in this job 16 years ago, the conference had very little income, the conference was not highly capable of doing all the things we’re now capable of doing.
“Several of us including myself decided we needed to go in a new trajectory. We decided to acquire a new commissioner, do a new television contract and launch a network. Also to expand the conference from 10 to 12.
“Of the 10 presidents that were in the room at the time, three of us are still there. All the others have traded out. Now what we have is people arriving on the scene now and they’re looking around and saying look at all the resources the SEC has and look at all the resources the Big Ten has, and we don’t have the same resources. We’re like no, but as soon as our contracts are renegotiated, we’ll have more and we’re extremely well positioned with our network to do all kinds of things.
“I’m basically urging everyone, it’s a long-term play so you have to take a longterm view. Relative to the long term, we’re doing exceedingly well on every front and we have more control. The others have sold their networks to commercial entities and thereby have lost control of their networks and lost control of their scheduling and other things, and we have not.
“I don’t know who’s doing all the portrayals (of Pac-12). If they’re looking at income from the Big Ten and the SEC, yes our income is lower than theirs. If they’re looking at our particular football performance, mediocre compared to others but lots of new coaching appointments, lots of new opportunities.
“I don’t know if I would judge the future of UCLA football based on this year’s football outcome. By my standard, we’re on track, we’re doing well, we’re making progress and we’re positioning ourselves for greatness going forward. What somebody will be writing about three years from now or four years will be, ‘How did the Pac-12 get ahead of us.’ “
Pac-12 income gap compared to other Power 5 conferences
“Conference income is a tiny part of everybody’s income. It’s just a piece of everybody’s income. You have your own advertising, conference income, donor income, athletic revenue themselves, other sources of income. From the conference perspective, we’re up five- or sixfold from where we were. We’re continuing to accelerate the network. We’re not producing out of our television contract quite what the others are producing the moment. Theirs came up and were renewed after ours was put in place. I don’t have any long-term concerns. There might be some issues on the short run.
“I also don’t think the best way to measure things is resources. The best way to measure things is graduation rates, championships, all kinds of things. There’s ups and down for everybody in those arenas so I think that when we made our strategic chance, which was to modernize the conference. From that point forward, things have gone very well, and I expect they will continue to go well. There may be some short-term heartburn that somebody is making more revenue than we are in conference A or conference B, but that’s an episodic thing.”
Pac-12 expenses from being headquartered in San Francisco
“San Francisco is by its very nature at the moment an extremely expensive city to be located in. The conference most recently the last few decades has been headquartered in metro San Francisco. Rather than having two offices in metro San Francisco, they decided to consolidate where the television network was built. The television network and San Francisco operations are extension and I’m like compared to what. Compared to Los Angeles or Seattle? It is highly likely the Pac-12 Conference will always be headquartered in California and in California it’s going to be Los Angeles or San Francisco. Both are expensive. It’s an expensive place to do business. That’s just the way it is.”
Pac-12 instant replay controversy
“I think there’s all kinds of complications around the whole issue of replays. In general we have to look at officiating in a way where we can produce the best outcome possible without attempting to produce perfection because perfection is not possible. I think the game should be reffed by the referees (not conference administrators).”
Potential expansion of College Football Playoff
“I’m kind of a weirdo in that I think the only people that should be playing in any kind of playoff, whatever the playoff is, are conference champions. I just think the conferences exist for a reason. If people want to criticize the Pac-12, let’s see how the Pac-12 champion does against the X champion. This year was the traditional Rose Bowl. The teams battled it out and were within one touchdown of each other. Fantastic game, fantastic comeback, fantastic everything. The Rose Bowl then in a sense could be a playoff game. If you’re the conference champion of a really tough conference, you have an 8-4 record and all the other teams are unbelievable, why shouldn’t you be in the championship. It’s not you ranked against everybody else at random. It should go to the conference champion of SEC playing the ACC or whatever other conference. I support that. If that means having a two-round system with three atlarge conference champions from the non Power 5s with the best records I’m OK with that also.
“I’d love to see the Pac-12 Conference champion always play the conference champion of another conference, and we’ll see who produces better football.”
ASU football after one season under Herm Edwards
“I think we took great positive steps at building the new model. The new model is this model of the coach and a general manager type construct advancing a team with a deep and personal connection to a coaching structure and staff which is not driven around only the persona of the head coach, but more broadly the coaching staff. That approach seems to work. We were competitive in every
“First, we had to know what the facts were. He was reprimanded based on the facts we had at the time. Then we launched a full-scale investigation when we had some other information to take a look at. We looked at all of that information, and we found was that there was no merit to it, which means his bad conduct was limited to the message he sent and the allowance of him letting another person use his cell phone. He was sanctioned at that appropriate level for what he was actually responsible for. If there had been more on the table, as was suggested by some other people who told us some things, if those had proven to be true then additional sanctions would have been taken.
“We feel the sanction was appropriate. We feel we did do a thorough investigation. We did look into ever allegation that was made. We did use an investigative service to do that. We found his entire conduct was limited to the message he sent and his allowance of another person using his phone for some very inappropriate conduct. And it’s also the case the person he sent the message to, he apologized to and she accepted it. So to us in looking at all these things, that’s what we found to be the totality of this.
“We have to have evidence by talking to the actual people involved in these situations. Not what shows up in a story somewhere or in a tweet somewhere or on somebody’s social media site. We interview everybody, we interview everybody that they know. We interview everybody that’s involved, everybody that makes an accusation then our investigators come back and tell us what happened and here’s what didn’t happen and here’s why that person wrote what they wrote because what they wrote isn’t true.”
Timetable for renovation of Wells Fargo Arena and hockey arena construction
“We haven’t made a final decision yet, but we’re spending the resources to do the design of the new multi-purpose arena and we’re also designing the update of Wells Fargo. We have to make sure what it costs and how it works, but that’s the direction we’re headed (for ground breaking in 2019).”