Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott announced a number of changes Wednesday during his appearance before reporters at the conference’s football media day. For one, the Pac-12 football championship game will move to the Oakland Raiders’ new Las Vegas stadium in 2020 and 2021, an attempt to boost attendance after the game last year between Washington and Utah in Santa Clara., California, drew an embarrassingly small crowd. Scott also said that the conference will send a team to the new Los Angeles Bowl, again starting in 2020, to play in the new NFL stadium being constructed for the Rams and Chargers.
But neither of those moves generated as much buzz as Scott’s announcement that the conference has had preliminary talks with its ESPN and Fox television partners about starting a few football games this season at 9 a.m. Pacific time.
“That would be new and somewhat out of the box but I’ve tried to put everything on the table,” Scott said. “I think there are some schools and markets that might respond positively.”
The Pac-12’s problems on the football field – only one of its teams (Washington in 2017) has earned a spot in the past four versions of the College Football Playoffs – are fueled at least in part by the fact that a sizable portion of its games are played late at night in the eastern portion of the country, when many viewers already have turned in. Moving up kickoffs to an abnormally early hour in the Pacific and Mountain time zones might have an adverse affect on tailgating at the stadium, but it almost certainly would put a few more eyeballs on the product overall.
“If the Pac-12’s top quarterback were to throw four touchdowns during a 9 a.m. game – if the top tailback were to rush for 200 yards – the highlights would be repeated, all day and night, on the ESPN and Fox studio shows. Top-25 pollsters, playoff selection committee members and Heisman voters alike would have greater exposure to the next Khalil Tate or Justin Herbert ... or, um, Christian McCaffery,” Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News wrote in floating the idea earlier this year.
The idea garnered mixed reviews from the conference’s coaches. Stanford coach David Shaw said college athletes are better off getting their rest.
“All the studies we’ve all read and conducted ourselves on our campus, our sleep studies, it is better for young people to perform athletically if they get a full night’s sleep,” he said. “And I don’t know that you can find any group of 18- to 22-year-old young people that are going to go to bed at 10 o’clock at night to get up at 6 o’clock in the morning to make sure they can perform athletically.”
But UCLA coach Chip Kelly was all for it.
“I’d kick off at 6 a.m.,” he said. “If you’re a college football player or coach, you want to wake up and you want to play football. The hardest thing with Saturdays is when you wake up and then you’ve got to wait until 7 o’clock at night. We’re also big on we don’t control our schedule and when we kick off. So tell us where it is and when we’re kicking off, and we’ll be there. We practice in the morning, so we’re morning people. We’d love to do things in the morning. I don’t know if our fans would, but again, I don’t have a vote, so I don’t care. Just tell us when we’re kicking.”
The Pac-12 is down in the dumps at the moment, its lack of football success – its teams went a horrid 1-8 in bowl games after the 2017 regular season – and a handful of self-inflicted wounds combining to form a Frankenstein’s monster of bad publicity. The conference’s television deal with ESPN and Fox, which was hammered out in 2011 and doesn’t end until 2024, generates just $20.8 million annually for each school, an amount dwarfed by conferences such as the SEC and Big Ten, which signed more recent and vastly more lucrative television contracts. The Pac-12’s in-house cable network is barely seen east of the Rockies thanks to its failure to secure distribution deals with cable and satellite suppliers such as DirecTV, and its production costs are seen as a drain on the conference’s finances. Scott, meanwhile, was portrayed as an extravagant spender and a vindictive ruler in a series of articles written last year by the Oregonian’s John Canzano. He also saw his salary rise to more than $5 million in fiscal year 2018, more than all but one other conference commissioner, while the conference’s revenue fell by $12.5 million year over year.
Moving up the kickoffs of two or three games obviously won’t cure all of that. But just imagine if a team such as Utah – picked as the favorite to win the conference by media members this year and a dark-horse national title contender – wins at USC on Sept. 20 to start 4-0 (that game, for what it’s worth, is a 9 p.m. Eastern kickoff on a Friday night). The Utes’ following game is Sept. 28 at home against Mike Leach and Washington State. What’s the harm in kicking off at 10 a.m. Mountain time and 9 a.m. Pacific? Teams in the Big Ten and Big 12 kick off at 11 a.m. Central all the time to satisfy the needs of the early ESPN/Fox windows. Utah can probably handle starting one hour earlier than that, and the dividends – a day’s worth of Utes highlights, presuming a win – could pay off down the line when the playoff committee makes its selections.
Alternately, they could play the game at 10 p.m. Eastern, attracting a likely smaller audience of East Coast college football die-hards and determined gamblers. The highlights would disappear into the ether of post-midnight highlight shows and evaporate completely when the NFL pregame shows begin the next day. Utah could be 5-0 and few would know it.
