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Pete ThamelESPN
The timeline for the Pac-12’s upcoming television deal is coming into focus, and sources told ESPN on Thursday that no deal is expected for a few more months.
With Pac-12 CEOs set to meet next week, sources told ESPN to not expect a deal to be announced. The timeline for a Pac-12 television deal, according to sources, is sometime later this spring or this summer.
There’d been recent comments from league presidents that suggested a deal was perhaps coming sooner. Arizona president Bobby Robbins used weeks as a timeline in a recent interview, and Arizona State president Michael Crow told The State Press the league was in the “final stages” of television contract discussions.
Those timelines appear too optimistic, as the Pac-12 remains engaged with multiple media partners, per sources. Those include streaming services, which have developed a reputation for deliberate contract negotiations, in part because they don’t have the same decades of experience in the space as traditional networks.
The Pac-12’s television deal is directly tied to the fate and future of the league, as the conference is seeking a stabilizing deal in the wake of the departures of USC and UCLA to the Big Ten.
The Pac-12 has one more year on its current deal, as ESPN and FOX still hold the primary rights through the 2023-24 season.
The timeline of the Pac-12 has been a matter of intrigue, especially as the departure of the Los Angeles schools has combined with the Big 12 securing a deal with ESPN and FOX a year before it was scheduled to go to market.
That has left an intense focus on what caliber of deal the Pac-12 can find. The timeline of the deal, as currently expected, appears to be in line with how the Big Ten’s timeline unfolded. The Big Ten’s deal was announced in August, nearly a year from when the new one would come into fruition.