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Pac-12 (official thread)

I'm reopening this thread to discuss the recent and upcoming changes to the Pac-10 conference. With the latest round of expansion over, this thread can cover aspects of the Pac-10 that really aren't germane to Big Ten expansion.

For me, it was prompted by this article:

Led by savvy commissioner Larry Scott, Pac-10 rebrands its image - Andy Staples - SI.com

Important passages:

Scott began the process of reinventing the conference by making concrete changes. He reorganized his staff. He met with television executives. In one a-ha moment, Scott was stunned when he learned from ESPN/ABC executives that the conference had turned down the reverse mirror option for split telecast football games on ABC. Reverse mirroring allows the portion of the country that doesn't get a particular game on ABC to watch that game on one of ESPN's family of networks. For example, if 33 percent of the country is getting Oregon-USC and 66 percent of the country is getting Michigan-Iowa on ABC, the east-coasters and Midwesterners who want to watch the Ducks and Trojans could simply tune to ESPN2. So instead of exposing the entire country to its product, the previous Pac-10 regime had forced Pac-10 football to remain largely a regional entity. Scott immediately corrected that mistake, telling ESPN that for the remainder of the existing contract, it could reverse mirror Pac-10 games at no extra charge. He also convinced athletic directors to allow more Thursday and Friday night football games to give the league more national exposure.
That's simply unbelievable. I'd be up in arms about that if I were an alumnus of a Pac-10 school. Forget about casual fans for a moment - that's poor stewardship of alumni relations.

Personally, I'm glad to see it. It means a few more quality-to-middling game on my TV every fall, and should bump some of the lesser (MAC, Sun Belt, Big East) games down or off my program guide.

SME also listed 10 currently held attitudes the Pac-10 can change with a more dynamic marketing effort. The most important is east coast bias, which SME suggested turning into a "west-coast advantage." Hollywood is smack in the middle of the Pac-10 footprint. Use that. To that end, the Pac-10 has hired Creative Artists Agency to help take better advantage of its proximity to America's entertainment capital. And though America's media capital sits nearly 3,000 miles from the heart of the Pac-10, the conference can begin to overcome that disadvantage by bringing itself to the media capital. So Tuesday, Scott and all 10 of the league's football coaches will hold a media day in New York City.
So they're taking advantage of their proximity to Hollywood by holding press conferences in NYC? Huh?

How do they take advantage of their proximity to Hollywood anyway - especially after the conference's marquee football program - notorious for their Hollywood hangers-on - just got the hammer dropped on them by the NCAA? I'm sure Hollywood is just dying to see and be seen in Corvallis and Pullman :roll2:

SME also pointed out that the Pac-10 states are the gateway to Asia, home to huge untapped markets. Last week, Scott held a conference call with some former WTA partners in Beijing to discuss the possibility of showing Pac-10 sporting events on Chinese television. Scott, who opened an office in Beijing when he worked for the WTA, pointed out that UCLA already has branded merchandise shops in the world's most populous nation. A huge chunk of the student populations at several Pac-10 schools is of Asian descent. So it only makes sense, Scott said, to begin sending teams to Asia for exhibitions or to begin bringing Chinese or Japanese college teams to Pac-10 campuses for exhibitions or clinics.

I don't think it's far-fetched to think that five years from now, you'll see Pac-10 teams competing in Asia, hosting teams over here, and the brand of the Pac-10 starting to built over there and exposed on TV," Scott said. "That's going to provide some great opportunity for student-athletes." He also hopes it might pave the way for more academic collaboration between Pac-10 schools and Asian universities.
Sure, a college football playoff would take students away from classes for too long, but we can send them to [censored]ing Asia to pimp our "brand"!

Once Pac-10 officials understood their brand, they needed a symbol to capture it. They needed their own swoosh or Dallas Cowboys star.


So they contacted several companies and asked them to submit ideas. Mutt Industries, the Portland firm that has done work in recent years for Nike, Coca-Cola and Heineken, designed more than 100 possibilities within a week. Mutt executives Scott Cromer and Steve Luker and senior designer Damien Webb experimented with 3D shapes, with equations (a Pac-10 design was one possibility) and a variety of standard two-dimensional logo. Scott loved the passion with which Mutt's team attacked the pitch, so he awarded the firm the contract in January.



PAC10_MAIN_MARK.jpg
There's more to read on their process if you click through...


One part I thought was funny though...


As a Michigan grad living in the heart of Pac-10 territory, Luker understands that disparity better than most. Luker recalled the run-up to Oregon's 2007 visit to Ann Arbor. Even though Michigan had just lost to Appalachian State, Luker said he and his fellow Michigan alums remained confident that a bunch of softies from the west coast couldn't beat the Wolverines in the Big House. "They absolutely kicked our ass," Luker said.
So designers chose a mountain and wave, which symbolize not only the Pac-10's geographic footprint but also its strength.
If they wanted a logo that would symbolize their ability to kick M*ch*g*n's asses, they could've skipped the wave and just stuck with the mountains:


Appalachian%20State%20University%20%2074197.jpg



...Or they could have eschewed the geographical features altogether:


OhioState_Logo1-759335.jpg
 
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Here's one bet that when all the smoke clears USC still ends up Pac 10 Champ this year and next. There's just not much else out there and to emphasize Hollywood simply puts all other programs that much more at a deficit.
 
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The Pac-12 held a groundbreaking ceremony for its Pac-12 Network studios in San Francisco this morning. Stewart Mandel has a write-up for SI.com:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/20.../pac-12.networks/index.html?eref=twitter_feed

"Everything that's on the Pac-12 Network, from day one, is going to be available on your iPad or on any mobile device," said Scott.

Scott and the growing staff of Pac-12 Enterprises -- which will encompass the TV networks, a conference digital network and a sponsorship department -- have just over six months left to pull off what can certainly be considered the most ambitious sports start-up venture to date. Pac-12 Enterprises President Gary Stevenson, who helped launch Golf Channel in the mid-'90s, began the job last fall, scouting potential headquarter locations (they settled on San Francisco in November) and hiring an executive team. He currently has about 25 employees on staff and is looking to add roughly 100 more between now and launch day.

"It's almost like building a game plan for a sporting event -- you have to do first quarter, second quarter, third quarter, fourth quarter," said Stevenson, meaning the project is into the second quarter of its year-long lead-up.

The Pac-12 begins with one notable advantage that most recent sports start-ups lacked: It's already secured distribution deals with the four biggest cable companies -- Comcast, Time Warner, Cox Communications and Bright House -- in its geographic footprint. In Pac-12 states, the national and/or appropriate regional network (Washington, Oregon, Northern California, Southern California, Arizona or Colorado/Utah) will be available on basic cable from day one. The national network will be available on those companies' digital sports tiers in other parts of the country.
"They're on the right track. They've got the right cable partners," said Pilson, former president of CBS Sports. "The one issue is fan loyalty in the Pac-12. You know there's fan loyalty in the SEC -- whether it's in Georgia, Alabama, Florida. The question now is to what degree the public in those [West Coast] areas embrace those channels."

It's a valid question. Pac-12 fan bases aren't generally as rabid as their South or Midwest counterparts, as the league's football attendance average was just 52,249 last season, well behind the SEC's figure of 75,832. Meanwhile, the networks will launch at a particularly dismal time for Pac-12 basketball, with the league in danger of placing just one team in next month's NCAA tournament.

On the other hand, Scott says, Pac-12 fans are the most passionate in the country about the so-called Olympic sports -- track and field, swimming, volleyball, etc. -- in which the conference has long excelled. Pac-12 affiliated athletes combined to earn 89 medals at the 2008 Beijing games, more than all but seven participating countries, with its schools producing such national headliners as swimmer Natalie Coughlin (Cal), softball pitcher Jennie Finch (Arizona), soccer goalie Hope Solo (Washington) and volleyball player Kerri Walsh (Stanford).

Beyond just alumni interest, the hope is that dedicated fans of those sports -- generally deprived of televised events in non-Olympic years -- will tune in to see the next wave of stars, including participants in this summer's London games.
 
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LovelandBuckeye;2110757; said:
Good for that conference but their football "fans" are so bandwagon.

They even admit as much in one of the quotes I selected. Don't bet against their ratings for Olympic sports though. Perhaps no one individual sport is going to come near the interest you'd expect in a football or basketball game, but they'll have a deep inventory and a stellar base of viewers for those events that the Big Ten Network probably can't match. On the whole, that's really going to add up for them.
 
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jlb1705;2110770; said:
They even admit as much in one of the quotes I selected. Don't bet against their ratings for Olympic sports though. Perhaps no one individual sport is going to come near the interest you'd expect in a football or basketball game, but they'll have a deep inventory and a stellar base of viewers for those events that the Big Ten Network probably can't match. On the whole, that's really going to add up for them.

I'm probably a minority in this, but I'll watch Pac-12 volleyball - men's and women's. Of course Nebraska is famous for being a volleyball school (with an occasionally good football team), so I'm pretty interested in the competition.

The Pac-12 also typically has pretty good baseball teams, so I'd tune in for that.

Bottom line - any programming that's not on ESPN is good. The less influence they have over college sports the better.
 
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knapplc;2110802; said:
Bottom line - any programming that's not on ESPN is good. The less influence they have over college sports the better.

The one thing ESPN will do to counter this is grossly overpay conferences to prevent them from branching out and starting a competing network.

Big Ten and Pac-12 already did this and I imagine ESPN will do whatever it takes for the SEC not to follow that model (and keep profits for themselves from a conference network).

One change that will happen sooner for the Big Ten (probably later for the Pac-12) is a renegotiation of game priority or selection.

I imagine the next contract BTN will have a higher priority and not get secondary games. The downside is, cable/satellite subscribers will have to pay a little bit more per month as BTN develops.

It's really going to be interesting to see if the Big Ten moves away from ESPN completely in a few years (to go to FOX). I think I read that Big Ten schools are in larger markets (combined), have more fans and in more homes than the Pac-12.
 
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PAC-12 Now, the PAC-12 Network's version of BTN2GO is now available for iPad. You need a subscription to one of their partner service providers to use, it (currently Time Warner, Cox or Bright House cable networks). I have Time Warner, and even though I'm in Ohio and PAC-12 Network is not available to me in my digital cable lineup, I'm still able to log in and watch on my iPad. Pretty cool. I have the Arizona State game on right now.

I'm a little jealous - it's a slicker app than what the BTN has right now. This app is iPad only - the description says there is an iPhone version forthcoming.
 
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Rare feat:

UCLA's Myles Jack wins double Pac-12 freshman player-of-year honors
By Chris Foster
December 2, 2013, 12:17 p.m.

UCLA’s Myles Jack has been named the freshman offensive and defensive player of the year in the Pac-12.
Jack, who came to UCLA as a linebacker, was inserted into the lineup as a running back the last four games this season.
He finished with 269 yards rushing, averaging 7.2 yards per carry, and scored seven touchdowns. On defense, he had 70 tackles. He clinched a 34-27 victory over Utah by intercepting a pass on the five-yard line with 16 seconds left.
Jack was also named second-team all-conference as a linebacker.

http://www.latimes.com/sports/sport...erence-20131202,0,2361269.story#axzz2mNwULhEx

Jack has been a beast this season if you haven't been watching. Beast.
 
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Taiwanese animators offer take on Utah fumble returned for Oregon TD

You know something has hit it big when the talented Taiwanese animators feel a need to offer their take on the story. This animated package of highlights has a little bit of everything to offer, from Marcus Mariota flying to the field riding an Oregon Duck, to Utah players popping champagne bottles on the field to a Flying V fumble return.



Entire article: http://collegefootballtalk.nbcsport...r-take-on-utah-fumble-returned-for-oregon-td/

Check out the video at the :28 second mark.
 
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