PAC-12 TO KEEP $65+ MILLION FROM EXITING SCHOOLS IN SETTLEMENT
Under the 20-page agreement, a redacted version of which was shared with Sportico, the 10 schools leaving the Pac-12 will each have $5 million withheld from their 2023-24 revenue distributions. They will also each pay an additional $1.5 million to the conference under the agreement, which ends months of legal back-and-forth and appears structured deliberately to avoid any future litigation.
On paper, that’s a $65 million concession to Oregon State and Washington State, which were left behind when the rest of the conference chose to depart for other leagues in the middle of a nationwide realignment. In reality, the two schools will see a lot more than that, because they’ll also keep the bulk of future Pac-12 revenue. The agreement states that outside of future income that was supposed to be paid prior to the 10 teams leaving this summer, all future Pac-12 revenue will stay with the conference.
That includes the tens of millions that the Pac-12 will be paid in the next six years for success in previous men’s March Madness tournaments. The NCAA rewards teams for their tournament success in a complex way, called units, which pay out for six subsequent years. As a very rough proxy, each game played by a Pac-12 team in the tournament is eventually worth about $2 million over the course of those six years, and the Pac-12 is still yet to be fully paid for dozens of those units.
That means Arizona’s run to the Sweet 16 (three units so far) and units earned by fellow departing members Colorado (three) and Oregon (two) will all stay with the conference.
