UW president says Big Ten move ‘about stability’

• Paolo Uggetti, ESPNAug 5, 2023, 10:43 PM ET

University of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce said Saturday that the program’s departure from the Pac-12 to the Big Ten alongside Oregon was “not practically dollars and cents” but rooted in myriad aspects, one being that the proposed television rights deal in between the Pac-12 and Apple did not supply the long-term stability the school was seeking.

“When you have an offer that individuals are saying that one of the best aspects are that you can leave it in two years, that informs you a lot,” Cauce stated in a teleconference with news media. “This had to do with national presence for our players, being on linear television so they can be seen, so they might have the nationwide exposure. It was about stability. It was about having a future that we might count on and built towards.”

Cauce went on to say that the television deal the Pac-12 presidents had actually been talking about a couple of days before was not the very same one that was on the table at the end, which the opportunities and stabilities supplied by the Big Ten were “simply unmatched.”

“I need to state this was heart-wrenching,” Cauce stated. “For more than a year, everybody worked actually, actually tough to find a feasible path forward that would keep us together.”

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Arizona State President Michael Crow, who also talked to the media Saturday in the wake of ASU’s departure to the Big 12, had a various outlook in spite of also leaving the conference. According to Crow, ASU was greatly interested in the Apple offer, which would have permitted instantaneous digitization of ASU football, men’s basketball and ladies’s basketball games and could likewise have enhanced the viewing experience in addition to the professional athletes’ ability to utilize game tape for their own purposes.

“There was some risk but big opportunity,” Crow said. “Some of the schools were devoted to that however it created this another destabilizing minute of sort of custom vs. this modern thing, so a lot of backward and forward.”

Cauce and Washington athletic director Jennifer Cohen were clear in their media availability that they were not in favor of the Apple offer, which they had expected to be one of numerous possible television agreements to assess, not the only one as it turned out to be.

“I have every reason to think that deals broke down due to the fact that of factors beyond [commissioner George Kliavkoff’s] control,” Cauce said. “There sufficed uncertainty [with the Apple offer] We had been living in uncertainty for too long to continue because level. It makes it very, really hard to build.”

The sudden departure of Oregon and Washington appeared to trigger those schools on the fence, such as ASU, to decide on their own futures as well. When Crow appeared to a pivotal conference between Pac-12 presidents at 7 a.m. PT Friday, he noticed 2 schools were absent from the call. That informed Crow all he required to understand.

“You may understand there then that the conference is no longer feasible,” Crow stated. “We were interested on discovering a method to connect to more individuals, however we have to be in a feasible conference to do that.”

According to Crow, while Colorado’s decision to leave the Pac-12 for the Big 12 last week was not completely responsible for ASU’s ultimate relocation, it did produce an unstable minute that put the conference and its staying members on notification. Once Oregon and Washington made their decision, Crow stated the school was forced to act and look for a feasible conference– in its case, the Huge 12 together with Arizona and Utah.

“There are a great deal of forces at work, including the overlords of the media empires that were driving a lot of this,” Crow said.” [ASU] was one of the stalwarts fighting for the Pac-12 up until the last minute.”

ASU athletic director Ray Anderson stated the program was trying to save the conference and stayed “in the trenches” for as long as possible until it became clear that staying was no longer an option.Cauce and Cohen seemed to reach that point earlier, in addition to Oregon’s leaders, and on Saturday, they expressed a combination of melancholy for leaving the Pac-12 and enjoyment as they discussed the sudden relocation the Huskies are making.”I’ll be the very first to state this is not best,”Cohen said.”There will be challenges. This does require a lot of modification in adaptability. Part of the decision was that we felt really confident in the agreement we had with the Big Ten to have the resources to adjust to the challenges, including travel costs and extra resources, that our student-athletes are going to need to have an effective experience in the Big Ten.”