Thursday was a day soaked in irony here at Trojans Wire. Wednesday night, when I scoured the internet and looked for stories to post on Thursday, I found an interview of George Kliavkoff conducted by Nicole Auerbach of The Athletic.

I scheduled the story to publish for 9:45 a.m. in Los Angeles on Thursday.

The story focused on Kliavkoff’s clear satisfaction with the Pac-12 Alliance with the Big Ten and ACC.

I included this Kliavkoff quote in the story:

But when it comes to our other priorities — student-athlete health and safety and collaborating on the big issues we face in college athletics — we have great achievements.

We’ve had several initiatives over our first couple of quarters. We launched Teammates for Mental Health, which is an initiative designed to raise awareness about the importance of student-athletes’ mental health and wellness. We had a webinar with best practice sharing related to career development, supporting graduating student-athletics, and so forth. We collaborated for the #AllVoteNoPlay webinar on social responsibility.

Obviously, there’s also been ongoing dialogue among the three commissioners and the staffs of all three conferences related to all of the big issues that college athletics is facing. I’d point out the joint initiative among the Alliance members to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Title IX. We’ve also put together student-athlete leadership webinars where leaders have gotten together to talk about best practices among the student-athlete leaders on how to help their teams. They’ve worked together on multiple issues related to wellness, health, safety, all that stuff. I’m just really proud of that.

George Kliavkoff talks about the value of the Pac-12 Alliance with Big Ten, ACC

Roughly 40 minutes after that story was published here at our site, Jon Wilner broke the bombshell story. USC and UCLA went to the Big Ten, the very thing the Alliance was supposed to prevent.

Kliavkoff was praising progress in areas other than football, and then the Pac-12’s existence as a football conference was immediately damaged to a severe extent.

Kliavkoff came across as a commissioner who was focused on non-football priorities. This is the one and only time he looked like Larry Scott.

To be achingly clear about all this, Scott — not Kliavkoff — is profoundly responsible for USC and UCLA bolting for the Big Ten. This is a problem of Scott’s making. His neglect of USC, his inability to fix the DirecTV problem, and the mess at Pac-12 Networks all contributed to a diminished Pac-12 brand which made USC and UCLA seek the vast riches of the Big Ten.

However, if there’s one thing Kliavkoff probably should regret about his otherwise-strong first year as Pac-12 commish (in which he did his best to clean up the messes Scott left behind), it is the fact that the Pac-12 Alliance with the Big Ten and ACC did not contain real teeth, some contractual guarantees which would have fully locked in USC and UCLA.

The ACC attached its members to a binding Grant of Rights provision which means that if any school leaves or wants to leave, it would face an uphill battle in doing so, certainly a mountain of litigation and expenses. Television rights for that school’s games would remain with the ACC.

Maybe Kliavkoff wasn’t in a strong-enough bargaining position one year ago, but if he was going to enter into a partnership with the Big Ten and ACC, he did need to insist on something more binding, more cost-prohibitive for Pac-12 schools to confront. No, Kliavkoff didn’t have maximum leverage, which is why he can’t be blamed too much for any of this, but he does look a little amateurish (albeit for reasons largely beyond his control) for thinking the Alliance was working well, on balance, only for this USC-UCLA move to happen.

The Alliance was clearly a bust. It clearly didn’t serve its purpose. Larry Scott is responsible for this mess, but the Alliance was a Kliavkoff chess move, and it didn’t work out. On that point there can’t be any debate.

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