Angst Watch 2024: Week 5
Beware the Rise of the PAC-Holes
The State of Angst
The college football world was chock-full of existential angst this week. ACC officials overturned a Virgina Tech Hail Mary touchdown despite lacking the clear video evidence necessary to justify changing the play. Auburn football turned in another loss following a week where a reporter in the Auburn press box said, “I'm going on Linkedin and finding another job.” Georgia and Alabama played an all-timer that ended when Georgia’s QB threw a heartbreaker of an interception.
But the vast, vast majority of the existential angst came off the field when Matthew Sluka, the starting quarterback of University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s undefeated football team, abruptly transferred earlier this week over a dispute about his NIL payments. Then, only a few days later, a series of unrelated corporate shenanigans began to unfold around athletic conference membership, with UNLV coincidentally at the center. Sports reporters across mediums have been apoplectic. They could be seen on street corners all over the country holding up signs that said, “The End is Nigh” and “Will Write Print Media for Food.”
The Sluka situation is easy to explain and deeply stupid. The corporate shenanigans are somewhat more difficult to explain, but they are also infinitely more stupid.
Readers will recall that the PAC-12 (which once included the likes of USC, UCLA, Oregon, Colorado and Washington) is now the PAC-2 because everybody but Washington State and Oregon State departed for better TV deals. This was a problem for the PAC-2, which is still legally a business entity called the PAC-12, because the NCAA requires conferences to have at least 8 members or else a conference will lose so many privileges within the NCAA structure that they may as well not exist.
Luckily, the Mountain West Conference was around. They walked up and said, “hey, why don’t you join us?” and the PAC-2 went, “well, we don’t want to join your conference, so how about we form a scheduling alliance instead?”
The Mountain West Conference stroked its chin and thought about this for a while. They finally said, “okay, our schools will agree to a special scheduling arrangement with you, but we’re worried you’re going to try and convince some of our 11 member schools to leave us for the PAC-12, so we’re going to put a clause in the contract that says you owe us a bajillion dollars if you poach our guys.”
The PAC-2 crossed its fingers behind its back and said, “okay, cool! Sounds good. You don’t have to worry about a thing. We’d never try and steal your guys, especially not Boise State, Utah State, Colorado State, San Diego State, and Fresno State.”
“Those… those are our biggest brand names.”
“Oh, really? What a coincidence!”
Then six months later, Mountain West schools Boise State, Utah State, Colorado State, San Diego State, and Fresno State announced they were going to leave the Mountain West and join the PAC-2. Which would make it the PAC-7. Which is still one school less than the eight required for the conference to exist and five schools short of the number needed to make the legal business entity name make sense.
The PAC-2/7/12 tried to coax UNLV to join next. For a hot minute it looked like UNLV was going, but they ultimately declined the invitation when the Mountain West Conference promised to give them a big chunk of the bajillion dollars the Pac-2/7/12 is going to owe them.
The Pac-2/7/12, though, wasn’t going to take this lying down. They filed a lawsuit against the Mountain West Conference, arguing that the poaching penalties are unenforceable based on an obscure legal theory called “I don’t want to so I shouldn’t have to.”
While the litigation plays out, both the PAC-holes and the Mountain West Conference are short of the Magic 8-Ball, so they are courting schools like Memphis, Tulane, and Toledo, none of whom seem to be interested in joining them, probably for reasons ranging from “we are already in a conference” to “you are fucking crazy if you think I’m going to fly that much.”
It’s not entirely clear what happens if neither conference can reach the membership threshold, making this whole thing reek of prisoner’s dilemma.
All of this is happening because the 1984 Supreme Court case, NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, had the unintended consequence of slowly morphing conferences from geographic and cultural groupings into television bargaining units. The teams that bailed on the PAC-12 did so not because they thought they’d be a better cultural fit playing teams on the other side of the country, but because, in the immortal words of Network, they got out “their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, min-max solutions, and compute[d] the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments.”
I don’t think that’s the case of what’s happening here, though. Neither the PAC-holes nor the Mountain West Conference have an especially attractive sales package. They do not represent notable television markets, nor do they include particularly eye-popping brand names to your average sports fan. Perhaps the PAC-holes can demand a slightly higher sum from networks than the Mountain West Conference, but it’s hard to imagine it being worth all the consternation and legal fees. It would make more sense, business-wise and sports-wise, for the PAC-12 and Mountain West Conference to simply merge.
But that’s not very min-max of me. A higher sum is a higher sum. It is naive and a little stupid, frankly, to assume that conference alignment should be based on things like geography, tradition, and common sense because this is America, a country where PAC-holes see themselves not as B-list inventory but as temporarily embarrassed must-see TV. Pretty sure it was Eugene Debbs who said that.
Oh, and also people played games this week.
Travis Hunter of Colorado flashed the Heisman pose after an interception which, well, fair enough. The guy’s ridiculous. The NFL may as well print out the number one overall pick draft card with his name on it.
USC came back from an 11-point deficit to beat Wisconsin 38-21. Wisconsin and USC play similar styles of offense, but USC understands that when your scheme is called “the air raid” you don’t start dropping bombs just because you go up a couple scores.
Texas A&M won a close rivalry matchup against Arkansas. A&M felt like a well coached, highly competitive outfit and they dropped out of the AP Poll because nobody actually watches the games.
Speaking of games nobody watched, Ohio State handily beat Michigan State during a game broadcast on Peacock. I have nothing against Peacock, but I already spend an arm and a leg to subscribe to cable networks, I don’t want to do what is effectively pay-per-view to watch two teams I don’t particularly like. It’s very easy to watch teams I don’t like for free.
Michigan, meanwhile, is a top ten team in the AP Poll which means they are doing great and nothing is on fire and this picture is definitely not an accurate description of how the season is going:
