Aug. 7, 2023
OPINION
BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
You’ve got to wonder who fell asleep at Stanford and didn’t move the university the Big 10 or the Big 12 before the powerhouses in the Pac-12 defected to those conferences. Now the Pac-12 is the Micro Four, with only Stanford, Cal, Washington State and Oregon State remaining.
And the $30 million a year Stanford got in TV rights from being a Pac-12 member is gone. Now, if Stanford is fortunate enough to join the Mountain West Conference, it will get about $4 million.
That doesn’t just hurt football. Stanford spreads the money around, so this hurts men’s and women’s basketball. Expect budget cuts in the Athletic Department.
Less TV exposure means it will be harder for Stanford to recruit star high school athletes.
The reaction of Stanford’s leadership to all of this was a big nothing burger. They issued a statement Friday saying:
“We are aware of the University of Oregon and the University of Washington’s intended departure from the Pac-12 conference. Our primary focus at this time is analyzing the available options and making the best decisions for Stanford and our student-athletes. We remain optimistic about Stanford’s athletics future and remain committed to pursuing excellence in college athletics.”
The statement was signed by Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the university’s president who is leaving after an investigation found discrepancies in his research, and Athletic Director Bernard Muir, who should have sounded the alarm that teams were leaving the Pac-12 and it was time to act.
Somebody was asleep on The Farm.
It’s been a couple of bad years for Stanford. Remember the law students who heckled a judge, the lawsuits over student suicides, an academic dishonesty scandal surrounding the school’s president, and a “harmful language” guide that banned words such as American? And I could go on.
When will the trustees step in and get Stanford back on track?
Editor Dave Price’s email is [email protected]. His column appears on Mondays.
Things are changing at Stanford. The President and Provost are leaving – good riddance – and so is the DEI Dean of the law school. The interim President is a competent individual and a major improvement over the outgoing President…unfortunately he is temporary.
A provost who is a self-declared feminist is the worst imaginable hire – the type of person who will deny tenure to any professor who is not sufficiently woke. The Athletic Director should have been fired a long time ago, as well.
On athletics, with the new transfer portal and rules on NIL rights, along with Stanford’s rigid academic standards and limitations on accepting transfers, I question whether Stanford should retain big-time athletics and instead have a club-sport only league without any varsity teams or move down to Div-III. Something similar to Cal Tech or U Chicago.
It’s really sad how the “leaders” mentioned above failed to the extreme.
Sue the the schools who left the pac 12