Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott said that he was "'very encouraged' by what he’s seen and heard to date from potential investors in the conference," but did not lay out a timetable for when the conference will make a final decision, according to James Crepea of the Portland OREGONIAN. Scott said, "One of the reasons we’re looking at this right now is our schools feel a tremendous amount of financial pressure. They do worry about the gap in revenues with peers from other conferences, both in terms of what gets distributed from our conference and in terms of what they’re able to generate locally compared to what peers in other conferences are able to generate locally." Scott said other conferences are "pulling away in terms of conference distributions." He added, "Let’s be real, folks jumped ahead of us and we have a gap. ... What we don’t want to do in the meantime is lose more ground between now and the next TV deal." Crepea notes the Pac-12 "expects a much larger TV deal when its deal is up" in '24. However, the "question remains whether Pac-12 schools can afford to wait until negotiating its new TV deal to act." Scott: "That decision will be made by our campuses. My role is to tee it up, to frame it, to create opportunities to allow them to make that decision" (Portland OREGONIAN, 5/2).
