Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott held a press conference today to officially announce Pac-12 realignment. Here are the day's bullet points...
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- For football only, the conference will split into two divisions of six. USC will join UCLA, Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah in the South. The Washington schools, Oregon schools and Bay Area schools make up the North.
- USC is guaranteed to play Stanford and Cal every year. They will split their remaining two conference games among the Northwest schools. For example, they will play Oregon every other year in the regular season.
- The conference will now have a championship game between the top two teams in each division. The game will be played at the home site of the school with the best conference record. In the event of a tie, head-to-head will be the first tiebreaker. Revenue will be split for the championship game.
- Speaking of revenue, all 12 universities will share equally in the media contract. Until the conference meets a certain revenue threshold, USC and UCLA will get $2 million payouts since they are making the concession from the old model to the new one.
- Under the current sanctions, the Trojans would not be eligible to play in the conference title game next year even if they win their division. However, the NCAA penalties are under appeal.
- As for basketball, USC will play an 18-game conference schedule always featuring a home-and-home with UCLA. The Trojans will play six other teams home-and-home and the remaining four in single games. Besides UCLA, the schedule will be on a rotational basis.
- A Pac-12 network is still in the commissioner's plans, but nothing has been locked down.
- Pat Haden met casually with the media inside Heritage Hall to answer their questions. Here is the video:
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I'm surprised they did not ask Pat Haden about the nine game conference format. To me, that is the most interesting part of this whole scenario. Currently, it makes sense to play nine conference games since there are ten teams. But playing nine conference games with 12 teams means that the conference is going to beat each other up more than other conferences who may play only 8 conference games, which means lower overall rankings and less bowl money, potentially. I'm not advocating playing cupcakes, but isn't that how the Big-12 and SEC end up getting so many teams ranked early in the season, because they play more out-of-conference games (and usually they choose lower echelon teams)? I wonder if they discussed playing less than nine games and how they assessed the overall benefit to the conference.