(Written by kencraw)

New conference commissioner is obviously very good at his job. There’s 3 billion obvious reasons ($$$) why. But as I was dissecting the details we have about the contract, one major thing hit me:

Minus the dollar figure, the CONTRACT is not as big of a change as it was pitched.

And at first glance, that seems ridiculous, but if you think about it, it’s remarkably similar to what we have today (minus the dollars of course). The key thing to note is that the Pac-12 TV Network (I’ll call it the “P12N”) is for all intents and purposes not part of the contract. I mean, none of that $3 billion dollars is paid so that we can have the P12N. If anything the contract dollar figure is smaller because we’re keeping the rights to broadcast the games.

But we have that today. Any game that isn’t picked up by either ABC/ESPN or Fox, is free for the home team to schedule through independent contract. Of course the P12N will centralize that and make the distribution of those games go through the conference, but again, while there may be language in the contract regarding that, it’s not a fundamental change in what sorts of rights the TV network has.

Once one breaks through that barrier, the rest of the similarities become clear:

The number of games included was the part for me that really drove the point home in my mind. This contract was pitched as covering “all games”, but when you get right down to it, it’s just a few more games a year (including the conference championship game).

Now, to be fair, it appears that on the Basketball side, we’ll be getting a lot more games on ESPN than before, but since this blog is a football blog, I’ll overlook that in this post.

Also, the addition of games on Fox and FX for the Fox side of the contract is notable for giving us more exposure, particularly since the FSN networks are not in a lot of people’s cable/satellite package. In fact, games on Fox, might just be the one area we’ll really get better national visibility.

But in my mind the biggest change is that the conference now gets some higher priority picks for their own distribution, as opposed to just getting the table scraps of what the TV networks didn’t want.

To be clear, I think the P12N is a HUGE, HUGE, HUGE deal. The fact that every game will be on TV is a big deal. But it’s not really part of that $3 billion dollar contract (in fact, it’ll take some of those dollars away from the schools for start-up dollars). What we really got is a contract that is remarkably similar to what we’ve had in the past, but we finally got ABC/ESPN and Fox to pony up for what it was worth and as a result, they’ll be showing a few more of those games on their best channels.

Just trying to put things into perspective…