The legacy Pac-12 colleges have exposed one last act of self-inflicted financial suffering, spanning from Seattle to Salt Lake City, Boulder to Eugene, and all points in between.
Since then, financial reports have been posted on school websites or made available upon request; they were due to the NCAA in mid-January.
They disclose the effects of the Comcast overpayment scandal that plagued the conference in the winter of 2023, as well as the negotiated settlement with Washington State and Oregon State.
Over the course of two years, that combination led to $125 million being withheld from conference allocations, with the ten legacy schools receiving an equal share of the money.
The following is the breakdown:
Each of the departing schools had $5 million withheld from their conference allocations as a result of the negotiated settlement in the autumn of 2023, and an extra $1.5 million supplement contribution was added to the tab.
All 10 would have seen a $6.5 million drop in conference payouts, which was reflected in the reports that were turned in to the NCAA a few weeks ago, if we assume that the supplement contributions were provided in the 2024 fiscal year—it wasn’t necessary; they had until December 31, 2024.
In the Comcast incident, the business was found to have overpaid the Pac-12 Networks for a decade. Conference executives were aware of the issue in 2017, but they chose not to notify Comcast, which in 2022 conducted an internal audit and found the overpayments.
According to former commissioner George Kliavkoff’s court affidavit in a case brought against the Pac-12 by two officials ousted following the controversy, Comcast then withheld a total of $72 million.
Although the precise amount withheld annually is unknown, the damage was distributed equally among the 12 institutions and affected the budgets for the fiscal years 2023 and 2024.
Utah’s 2024 financial report to the NCAA revealed an operating deficit of $17 million. The report’s supplement stated:
The Pac-12 Conference’s dissolution and drastically lower distributions as a result of the negotiated withdrawal deal, legal fees, and overpayment of previous year’s television distributions are mostly to blame for the shortfall.
A representative for the athletic department informed the Hotline that Utah was unable to give information when asked about the overcharge category. (It is likely that the Pac-12’s agreement with Comcast contained non-disclosure terms that governed the case.)
The NCAA financial disclosures, which show sharp declines in several revenue streams at a number of schools, including Utah, highlight the overall harm brought about by the Comcast dispute and the negotiated settlement.
We should now take a step back from the specifics and clarify two crucial elements of the financial reporting system:
Four main sources accounted for Pac-12 distributions in the 2024 fiscal year: football postseason revenue (such as the College Football Playoff); NCAA Tournament performance payments; media rights agreements with ESPN, Fox, and the Pac-12 Networks carriage deals; and conference revenue unrelated to media rights, March Madness, or the CFP. Every school has a slightly different approach to accounting.
Local radio contracts, sponsorship agreements, digital and e-commerce rights, and Pac-12 television contracts are all included in the media rights revenue that the colleges disclose. Because of this, the sums differ significantly between campuses and do not correspond to the media distributions listed in the Pac-12’s federal tax returns.(Those only show the agreements with the Pac-12 Networks, Fox, and ESPN.)
The harm done to athletic department finances was discovered by our analysis of NCAA data.
For instance, in the line item that excludes media rights and football postseason payouts, Utah’s net revenue differed by $9.9 million from the Pac-12.
In fiscal year 2023, the Utes reported a $3.0 million surplus; in fiscal year 2024, they reported a $6.9 million deficit.
It’s uncertain how much of that is attributable to the Comcast disaster in particular in 2024. However, the Utes’ bottom line was in deep red as a result of the decline in conference revenue. There was a $17 million operational deficit in one of the previous Pac-12’s most cost-conscious athletic departments.
Similar changes were seen in Oregon, where the Ducks reported a $1.8 million conference income surplus in 2023 (not including media rights and football postseason) and a $8.2 million shortfall in 2024, or a $10 million swing.
If we were to oversimplify, we could infer the following from the $10 million swing between Utah and Oregon: It would appear that $3.5 million would remain after the revenue drop associated with the Comcast scandal, since $6.5 million is based on the negotiated settlement with Washington State and Oregon State. (A total of $6 million over two years from Comcast.)
Over a two-year period, Colorado likewise demonstrated a significant decrease in conference distributions. In the fiscal year 2022, the Buffaloes had a surplus of $8.3 million; in 2023 and 2024, that amount fell to $2 million and $1.8 million, respectively.
In the line item representing media rights, UCLA appears to have taken into consideration the Comcast cut and the settlement withholdings: The Bruins reported $19.9 million in 2024 after $27.8 million in 2022.
When the Pac-12’s tax returns for 2024—the last year for legacy schools in the conference—are released in May, the financial picture will become clearer. They will cover the postseasons for basketball and football as well as conference payouts from media rights.
However, there is currently enough data to show that each legacy school has suffered losses of about $12 million as a result of the Comcast incident and the settlement reached after the league was broken up.
For the football coach and his whole staff, that is the equivalent of a year’s wage.
It covers all of the varsity sports’ yearly travel expenses.
Once the Power Four adopts the revenue-sharing arrangement, it will nearly pay the cost of the football team ($15 million, roughly).
Naturally, the root cause of both circumstances is the same: years of appalling administration by the commissioners and university presidents, which harm the athletes and force the expense of operations on the supporters.
The original version of this article was published on Wilson Hotline.
Contact: [email protected]; Jon Wilner. Having covered college athletics for decades, Wilner is a Heisman Trophy voter and an AP top-25 football and basketball pick. He is a five-time APSE recipient, received first place for feature writing in the 2016 Associated Press Sports Editors writing contest, and was named Beat Writer of the Year by the Football Writers Association of America in 2013 for his coverage of the Pac-12.
