PAC-12 CONFERENCE MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP

March 10, 2022

George Kliavkoff

Jamie Zaninovich

Media Conference

THE MODERATOR: All right. We'll go ahead and get started here. We'll have the mics open. We'll have opening statements from the commissioner and deputy commissioner, and we'll open it up to Q&A.

GEORGE KLIAVKOFF: Thank you all for being here and for your coverage of Pac-12 men's basketball. As many of you know, before I joined the Pac-12, I was at MGM Resorts and had a small role in helping bring the Pac-12 basketball tournaments to Las Vegas.

It's exciting for me personally to see how this event has grown over the past ten years in Las Vegas and how our student-athletes and fans coming to Las Vegas for basketball tournaments have just loved the experience.

We've already had some great games this week, and we're looking forward to an exciting next few days and to crowning the Pac-12 men's basketball champion on Saturday, and we're also looking forward to tomorrow inducting new inductees into our Hall of Honor. We didn't get to do that last year, so we're looking forward to making up for some lost time.

This is an exciting time of year for college basketball, and we're fortunate to have elite teams on both the men's and women's side who have the skills necessary to make deep runs into the NCAA Tournament.

I'll hand it over momentarily to our deputy commissioner, Jamie Zaninovich, who oversees men's basketball, among his other responsibilities, to speak in more detail about the state of our league and our teams. But there are, of course, other major developments in college sports these past few months.

Although we're here primarily to talk about men's basketball, I'll be happy to answer questions as part of the other topics of Q&A. With that, I'll turn it over to Jamie.

JAMIE ZANINOVICH: Thanks, George. Great to see everyone. It's nice to be back to a little normalcy, including an in-person press conference. Hopefully, everyone can see the energy in the building these past couple days. It's been great to get our events back with fans in the building and otherwise.

I want to take just a few minutes to talk about Pac-12 men's basketball, then as George said, we're happy to take any questions.

Last year, of course, was a remarkable year for us in Pac-12 men's basketball with several of our teams making the NCAA Tournament; four in the Sweet 16, which is a conference record, three advancing to the Elite Eight, and of course UCLA becoming our first Final Four team since 2017 and playing in arguably one of the most historic Final Four games in the history of the NCAA Tournament.

A lot of positive momentum from last year. Last year I think we had 13 NCAA Tournament wins, which was an all-time record. We hope to extend that momentum. Obviously, that was kind of a watershed moment for us to have 13 wins in the NCAA Tournament and something that was really born, I think, of the commitment from our schools, significant commitment to invest in men's basketball, to see it as an opportunity in the future. We also worked together behind the scenes with our schools to do what we could at the conference level to help effect positive change. We'll talk more about that in a second.

This year we think we have three elite teams, all capable of deep runs, Final Four runs, National Championship-caliber teams. They've achieved great success and obviously are here this week.

Arizona, in particular, has been discussed a lot. We feel pretty confident that regardless of outcomes in the next couple days that they will be a Number 1 seed, which will be our first Number 1 seed in the NCAA men's basketball tournament since 2016. That's a very significant accomplishment for us and one that we hope will become obviously an annual tradition.

I think it's fair to say we've had not the depth we've usually had this year. That's a little bit a factor of the fact that we do have top teams that have done very well in conference play, but I think also we need to recognize it was a challenging season. We had nine nonconference games that didn't get played. A lot of marquee opportunities; Colorado, who just finished playing, had a home game against Kansas that didn't get played; North Carolina and UCLA were supposed to play. All of those nonconference games that were obviously affected by COVID that didn't get played impacted our ability, I think, to have sort of a deeper stable of teams.

But we're still confident that we have a couple beyond those three, particularly Colorado, I think, especially with their performance today. That could be significant at-large selections. We'll have to see what plays out in the rest of the country.

I think the other thing that should be mentioned, with all the COVID challenges this year, we were able to play all 120 of our conference games. It's a testament to our schools, the flexibility that they were able to endure for the second year in a row. We had 17 games that were cancelled, and we had to reschedule. That's almost 15 percent of our conference season of the 120.

So we're very fortunate, ironically, to have a travel partner schedule where we play Thursday, Saturday. That allows us to populate some games on Monday, Tuesdays midweek, and that really was a lifesaver for us in getting all of our games in and being able to have a conference race where everyone ended up playing 20 games, 10 home, 10 away. For competitive equity reasons, that's really important for conference championships and seeding and the like.

I referenced how we've worked with our schools in the past. We're obviously still executing our men's basketball strategic plan which we launched five years ago. I think it's worth probably sharing a couple of the initiatives that came out of that.

First of all, we're in year two of our 20-game conference schedule. For those of you that follow us, everybody in here, obviously we moved two conference games, one home and one away, into the December time period around our football champ game. That's been very well received, to have conference games earlier in the season. It gives us a relevance I think nationally, and I think it gives us better home inventory for our teams in that time period and also gives us more games within the conference season. So that's just more strength in a lot of our nonconference schedules.

We're also in year three or four of our nonconference scheduling standards, so we work with our schools every year. We do not approve their nonconference schedules, but we do review them, and there are certain metrics they have to execute on to assure that they're playing the right teams and avoiding playing some of the teams that do not contribute to their individual nonconference schedules or to the conference schedule.

We also launched our own Pac-12 branded neutral site event, the Coast-to-Coast Challenge, which was here for the first time in December. Stanford played Texas. We had a women's game that was impacted, but next year that event will be in Dallas. Stanford men will return that game to Texas. We'll also have two marquee women's games in American Airlines Arena, Pac-12 branded in a very important market for us, so we're looking forward to growing that over time.

We're very proud of the SWAC partnership, scheduling partnership we launched with the Southwest Athletic Conference, where really in an unprecedented initiative, we will be, over a four-year period, men's and women's games between the Pac-12 and the SWAC, which is an HBCU conference, a series of home-and-home games that will not only involve competition between our schools, but also education initiatives and a lot of, I think, sort of understanding in the social justice and equity area, which obviously as educational institutions and being college athletics is super important to us.

Also, it would be inappropriate for me not to mention the alliance. We are working with the Big Ten and ACC on some creative alliance initiatives. We're not ready to announce anything yet, but we hope to be able over the next year to come up with making some progress there and playing more games against those conferences. It's obviously a very important initiative in the alliance.

Lastly, I'll highlight one more initiative that our Pac-12 men's basketball coaches actually launched themselves a number of years ago, which is the McClendon Minority Leadership initiative. This is a funded position on each of our campuses by our men's basketball coaches that supports an entry-level position for a diverse candidate. It was launched very shortly after the George Floyd tragedy, and we have young administrators on our campuses that are going to make their way and become the leaders of tomorrow that hire coaches. That was the goal of our coaches, to help make a difference in the diversity category on our campuses.

There's obviously a lot going on in Pac-12 men's basketball. We're super excited for the games tonight and then to get to the semifinals and finals. With that, I think we'll take some questions.

Q. Commissioner, last we saw you here back at the football championship game, you very effectively saber rattled in referencing the prospect of after '26 a subset majority, super majority, some group. If you couldn't come to uniformity on the 12-team proposal on expansion of the playoff, then a different group could come up with something and basically going forward in '26, and maybe that hastens things. Now that you and your alliance partners have voted against it, what stops the other eight from doing exactly what you suggested to you and leaving you and this conference out in perpetuity?

GEORGE KLIAVKOFF: So as far as I'm concerned, the time to publicly talk about the CFP is now over. I think the next piece of work that needs to be done is we need to get in the room and figure out what the expanded playoffs look like. Unless I'm forced to publicly talk about it, the next time I talk about the CFP will be to announce what our new format looks like.

Q. Commissioner, most of the first round and quarterfinal games for the men's basketball tournament are on Pac-12 networks, not totally available to a lot of people nationally. What do you think of the broadcast schedule and everything this year, and how do you see it developing moving forward?

GEORGE KLIAVKOFF: I'm very happy with the number of games that we produce at the Pac-12 Network and the quality of those games that we produce. I'm not happy with the distribution of the Pac-12 Network. I've been very public about that, and it's part of what we're going to fix when we renegotiate our media rights at the end of the current term.

Q. Any thoughts on expanding the basketball schedule to potentially use Monday and Tuesday as options after seeing the effects of having kind of a week-long conversation about the Pac-12?

JAMIE ZANINOVICH: Yeah, it's a really good point. It's interesting. Having been sort of forced to get out of our traditional Thursday, Saturday, sometimes Friday and sometimes Wednesday, sometimes Sunday format, I think that sort of opened the eyes to everybody sort of what the possibilities are.

I think we anticipate, when we meet with our coaches in May and then our athletic directors, trying to bring some creative ideas as to how to leverage more days of the week. It's tricky with our geography. There's a reason we've been in travel partners for so long. But personally it's sort of the drumbeat of Pac-12 basketball that we've seen these past two years, because of our scheduling Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I think it really helped us.

So it's something that we noticed. It's something that I think we want to take back, again, starting with our coaches and talking to out athletic directors who manage men's basketball and try to be creative to see if it's something we want to do, to your point, expanding the days of the week that we play and getting some more clean windows nationally.

GEORGE KLIAVKOFF: My assumption is our potential new media partners in our renegotiated media rights deal will be asking us about that as well.

Q. You guys talked about being able to reschedule a lot of the men's games, or all of the men's games, which was great. What about the women's games that a lot of them were not able to get completed? What were the challenges in not being able to do that?

JAMIE ZANINOVICH: Yeah, I think the biggest challenge is we just have different scheduling formats, right? The men play a 20-game schedule over ten weeks. The women play only over nine weeks because of the timing of their tournament.

So what that means is that in men's basketball, you have Thursday, Saturday weeks, and then we have a travel partner week where we only play one game where we're able to reschedule games. There just aren't as many days for women.

So the principles that we put in place that we didn't want to, for a number of reasons, for student-athlete health and safety, competitive equity, no more than three games in one week, these type of principles, you can't execute those on the women's side because the schedule is just more compressed.

So I think Teresa and the coaches and the senior women's administrators did a great job of identifying these Wednesdays in some of the weeks where they could put games, and they got as many in as they could, but it's just a different model. So it was much harder to execute on getting all the games in.

GEORGE KLIAVKOFF: A couple other data points. I think the Omicron variant hitting some of our teams happened to the women's teams later in the season than they happened to the men's teams, and of course the women end their season a week before because the women's tournament is a week before. So there just wasn't time to make it up, as Jamie mentioned.

Q. The lease on the headquarters in San Francisco is ticking down. Have you given thought to where the conference headquarters should be, and would you consider splitting off the network and having the network have a satellite office somewhere other than the conference headquarters?

GEORGE KLIAVKOFF: Yes, so the answer is we've given lots of thought to it. We've actually started negotiations. It's part of our board agenda for our conversation this coming Saturday. When we're ready to announce anything related to where any of our employees are going to be based, we'll let you know.

Q. Question and then a follow-up, if I may, regarding women's basketball also. I'm sure the issue was brought to your attention before I wrote the story last week about gamesmanship and how a quarter of the game's coaches had obviously the two forfeits this season and a lot of liberty taken regarding rescheduling over the past two years. Spoke with Teresa about it; it's clearly going to be an agenda item for the spring. What has been your reaction to this matter, and how would you like to see it rectified in the spring? As I say, I have a follow-up in a broader perspective.

GEORGE KLIAVKOFF: Yeah, I agree 100 percent with Teresa's approach to making sure it's on the agenda. We're going to discuss it with the coaches, that that should not be an issue going forward.

Q. The follow-up is until that's addressed in the spring, what is to stop in your spring sports, baseball and softball coaches, from saying, oh, well, I don't want to play somebody who can kill my RPI; I'll just take the Ls. Do you believe you have in your power, in the commissioner's office's power, the ability to prevent this now before spring meetings for the spring sports under something like conduct detrimental or under the purview of instilling competitive integrity and conduct detrimental? Because as I say, someone who wants to avoid playing someone with an RPI of 200 in early May would be better off just taking the approach that Cori Close and Charli Turner Thorne took this season?

GEORGE KLIAVKOFF: I'm not sure you're properly representing what happened, and I think you're overstating it as a problem. It's not a problem for our league, particularly in other sports. We haven't seen any instances of that. And the answer to your question is yes, it's completely within my purview to make sure that doesn't happen.

Q. I was actually wondering about the gamesmanship too. I'm from Arizona, and I'd heard a lot around the league just coaches saying, well, we're not ready, we really don't want to play. Other coaches saying they're not sure. Everyone was suspicious of each other about whether they really had COVID problems and couldn't play or not. How did you guys deal with that, and how could you tell who's saying the truth? And how did you get through that period in early, mid-January when you were having to reschedule?

JAMIE ZANINOVICH: We really started with the playbook on this last year, and the way the rescheduling works is it's all informed by our medical group. We have a Pac-12 COVID and medical advisory group with a representative, at least one from each institution that works together on an ongoing basis and has been for a while. Basically, anytime we had a report that someone couldn't play, that was always verified by the medical staff on that campus, independent of coach, athletic director, what have you, in writing, verified by a representative from the Pac-12 COVID medical advisory group.

So we had our rules. We have seven to play, et cetera. A school would make a request, right? Hey, we're under the number. We would go to the medical advisory. They would confirm that from the medical standpoint. That would be passed by our medical liaison, and then the recommendation would be made to George on that team as to whether they'd get relief on that game or not.

I think it was actually a pretty good process. These doctors talk all the time on a number of times on a lot of things, so there's some reputation effects between them, and there's a lot of credibility there, and I think it worked fairly well.

GEORGE KLIAVKOFF: That process, I have kind of great respect for, and it's also a process that allows me to come to the conclusion that this is not an issue in our league.

Q. George, Tad Boyle was just talking about how he feels that Colorado is on the wrong side of the bubble conversation because of national perception, and he put a lot of the blame on ESPN for broadcast windows in that time. If last year's NCAA Tournament success was a watershed moment for the conference, then why is there still a perception problem for the league?

GEORGE KLIAVKOFF: I don't know why there is a perception problem for the league. I think if you finish fourth in our league and finish with three Quad 1 wins, you deserve to be in the tournament. But, again, we don't get to make those decisions.

JAMIE ZANINOVICH: I guess the only thing I would say there is I would be careful to -- I spent three years on the men's basketball committee. It was a while ago, but I did spend some time in that room. I would be careful of drawing a strict correlation between public narrative to the committee's decisions. They're very well-informed. They don't align, with all due respect, AP polls and things like that. We have a representative in the room, Martin Jarmond from UCLA. He'll be there. His job is not to follow the Pac-12, but he'll inform it. I think we have great confidence in the committee that we'll be treated fairly.

Q. George, the Mid-American Conference announced earlier this week a deal with Genius Sports to manage and potentially sell its data to gaming companies. Any chance the Pac-12 is pursuing a deal like that?

GEORGE KLIAVKOFF: Particularly considering my background, I think data is part of media rights, and media rights is one of the issues that are at the top of the agenda for this coming Saturday with our board, and we're certainly going to be discussing data rights as part of that package.

Q. With a move of the basketball tournament from Los Angeles to Vegas, I think everybody thinks it's a better experience; it was the right move for everybody to do. Attendance was an issue in Los Angeles. It still seems to be an issue now. I know with COVID and everything, but it was still an issue before COVID. What kind of things are you guys doing to up the attendance because I think you have an opportunity here to sell this place out on every game.

JAMIE ZANINOVICH: What are we doing on attendance? We've been in this market for a long time. We have great partners through MGM and otherwise. I do think it's been a challenge, not only here, but on campus all year. I think we've seen just with coming back from COVID, it's been really hard on athletic departments.

I think we're pretty confident that as the success in the league competitively continues to grow, we're confident in that, and as we sort of deepen our relationships with our partners here. We have one more year on this agreement. We certainly want to talk about our future here as well. You'll see us leaning into a lot of initiatives to get this building back to where it was before COVID 2017/2018, where we really had a full house.

GEORGE KLIAVKOFF: I don't want to overstate it, but we surpassed our budget for the men's and the women's tournaments in what we expected this year. But again, we had budgeted for coming out of COVID, that it wasn't going to be sold out every single session. We have to get back to that.

Q. George, speaking of your background, Las Vegas is a city now up to ten conference tournaments right now. What have you thought and felt as someone who knows the city well about that? And what do you think maybe it says about the way the rest of the country thinks about Las Vegas?

GEORGE KLIAVKOFF: Well, Las Vegas has been the entertainment capital for a long time, and I think it's becoming the sports capital. The great success of the three professional teams that are in town, the Golden Knights and the run they had in this building their first year, obviously the Raiders, and then the Las Vegas Aces, and I think this town is going to attract more professional sports.

I was part of bringing several of those ten tournaments that are all going on last week and this week. There's more than 100 college basketball games in this town. I've been fortunate to go to a couple of games that were not part of our tournament over the last couple of days, and it just is becoming the sports capital, and I think people are realizing that.

It's a great place to hold one of these tournaments for a couple of reasons. It's walking distance for some of the venues to lots of hotels, and the hotels are at various different price points. So people with different budgets can afford to come. There's also so much else to do while you're here that kind of fills your day.

So I love Las Vegas, and I think it's a great place for the tournament.

Q. Just following up on my other question, I was wondering, now that it's done, I know you guys had a statement that, when you rescheduled the partners, academics, arena availability, et cetera, all these priorities you had to deal with, I was wondering, especially in that early January period, what the priorities were like? For example, I'm asking because Arizona, for example, had one game in three weeks without pausing, and I believe they had a bunch of dates where they could have played. I'm wondering, did it ever come to where they could have played, say, UCLA but ESPN didn't find a window? How did it play out in those cases? Was television windows maybe as much as anything? How did the priorities play out in that case?

JAMIE ZANINOVICH: Honestly, it's hard to remember every instance. Things were going so fast, and we were trying to get the games in.

I think it's fair to say, like any complicated issue, there's never one factor. We had to juggle a number of things: Availability of the teams, availability of facilities, obviously delivering on our television agreements and finding windows that were not contemplated at the beginning of the year at a time when other conferences were also canceling and rescheduling their games. So that was a constant sort of juggling act.

We had to take into account what the facilities looked like, not exclusively, but whether there were fans there or not certainly was a factor. We want our games to look good when they're on TV, and we want to give our schools an opportunity to obviously maximize their sort of commercial value and fans attending their games on campuses.

So there's no one factor that went into any of those decisions. If there was, they would have been a lot easier and made much more quickly, but you have to measure all those things and kind of make your best guess. The athletic directors met in December when things really started getting difficult, and we were getting into seven, eight, I think at one point nine teams on the shelf, and they were overlapping. They said, hey, slow down. Why don't you look ahead at the schedule. Let's get some teams through these pauses, here are some principles, reschedule within these. We got very fortunate that we were able to get all the games in within those principles.

GEORGE KLIAVKOFF: I think fortune had something to do with it. I'm extremely proud of Jamie and his team and also how they worked with all of our schools. The fact that we got all of these rescheduled for the men is candidly miraculous given some of the complications we were facing.

Q. Jamie, you mentioned some of the nonconference scheduling thresholds, and I know that you guys took the SEC model from seven or seven years ago and instituted it a couple years back.

JAMIE ZANINOVICH: Well, sort of. We started the model when I was at the West Coast conference before that, but yeah, we did.

Q. With that, what Tad left out of his comments is they're 9-0 in Quad 4 with two teams in the 300s that was not an aberration, and multiple teams in the mid to upper 200s that were not aberrations. Does this approach need further tweaking to avoid anyone ever playing anyone in 300s in Quad 4 because they destroyed their own math? I mean, that's what the metrics are. You talk about what the committee's informed on. It's not just the peaks and the highs, it's they harm themselves.

JAMIE ZANINOVICH: Listen, I think our impact -- our schedules, I think, were pretty good this year. The reality is we didn't win enough nonconference games. We track this pretty closely. We have a goal of 75 percent winning percentage across the conference. I think we won 64 percent of our nonconference games. Some of that was impacted by the games we lost. There's a lot of games in there that you'd think we'd win, and that number would come up.

At the end of the day, to your point, it's pretty simple math. You win 75 percent, you get a positive multiplier when everybody comes in, you get a lot of Quad 1s, Quad 2s in league. If we're down towards 64 percent where we were, you end up having kind of a negative multiplier. As a result, there aren't as many good in-league games. When you're playing 20 versus 18, sort of the sensitivity is even higher, right?

So I don't know -- I don't think that we played bad schedules. I think we had weird situations due to COVID and otherwise where we just didn't win as many games as a percentage basis as we normally do.

Last year I think we were just above 74 percent. We ended up getting five teams in with one that came through our tournament. The year before, we would have had six teams in the tournament when it got cancelled. We were up near 76 percent, I think.

So it's pretty simple math. At the end of the day, when you go out in the nonconference, regardless of the number of teams, those games especially that you bank on winning that drive that percentage, you have to win. We just did not have a good November and December. That's just the reality. It's unfortunate, and it becomes really unfortunate for someone like Tad in Colorado because they don't get those opportunities to move their net up once they get in conference.