PAC 10 to vote on giving USC, UCLA more money

The Pac 10 will announce tomorrow how their new 12 team conference will be divided up by conference, and the school presidents and Chancellors will vote on a plan to give USC and UCLA a bigger piece of conference revenue pie. This is a little complicated, but I don’t really like the idea of one (or two) schools getting a bigger share of revenues that should be split up equally. I don’t care if USC and UCLA bring in more revenue because without the other PAC 10 schools they would be nowhere.

So the plan is a temporary one, the two schools in Los Angeles would get the extra payouts until the conference broadcast revenues reached a certain plateau. It is being reported that this plateau would be somewhere around 130 to 170 million dollars. Currently the PAC Ten rakes in around 53 million for basketball and football TV contracts.

Here is my other complaint about this proposed deal, the PAC 10 currently lags way behind the SEC and Big Ten and their 200 million dollar a year TV deals. My question then is if USC and UCLA are so valuable to the conference why is the TV contract so small? The answer to that is the PAC 10 negotiated their TV deal three years before the super deals were agreed to by the other conferences.

The most current deal settled was that between the ACC and ESPN/ABC. That was singed last summer and is for 155 million dollars annually. A new TV deal for the PAC 10 that includes the Denver and Salt Lake City TV markets will surely be worth at least that much.

Related Links:

•The Business of College Football
•Joshua Lobdell.com