The Pac-12 is officially dead after news last week of Oregon and Washington joining the Big Ten and Arizona, Arizona State and Utah following Colorado to the Big 12.
In the opinion of 92.9 The Game hosts Carl Dukes and Mike Bell, the big winner in all of this is FOX.
FOX will now work with the Big Ten to figure out how adding two more schools in addition to USC and UCLA will impact the media rights deal agreed to last year.
Dukes said while FOX is the big winner, the big loser in this appears to be ESPN considering they won’t be getting a piece of the Big Ten pie.
“ESPN will not have any involvement going forward with four of the biggest brands on the west coast,” Dukes said Friday on Dukes & Bell. “So when you talk about the TV money with FOX and ESPN and how this is an arms race, and I said this earlier in the show for those of you who missed it, I know SEC fans are like, ‘Who cares, we’re the SEC.’ Haha. If I got more schools than you, I got more power than you.”
“I think they’re in a position of power when it comes to college football,” he said.
Bell responded saying The Worldwide Leader doesn’t appear to be in a spot to formulate an answer. He felt like the network will have to just roll with the deals it has.
“I don’t think ESPN is in a position right now to cut anybody another check or tear up a contract,” he said. “They just laid off 5,000 people with Disney.”
The question then became what does the SEC do, if anything, in response to the Big Ten and Big 12 scooping up the key Pac-12 schools. Texas and Oklahoma are joining the conference next year, and Florida State and Clemson seem like the most logical institutions to add. But both FSU and Clemson would have to cut checks of $120 million to leave the ACC.
