The Pac-12's Nightmare Will Never End

There is no magic salve that'll make all of George Kliavkoff's problems go away

It’s been close to 400 days since two L.A. area schools lent a death knell to the Pacific 12 Conference that was a decade in the making.

When the 100-plus year-old collective lost UCLA and USC to the Big Ten on July 2, 2022, the band on the deck of the Titanic was merely hitting their collective denouement, with the bungled attempt at parking the crippled ocean liner that is the Pac-12 proving too much of an ask.

The third and (perhaps) final act of the conference’s tragicomedy three-part act came on Tuesday morning, when ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported the Pac-12 was asking leaders to accept Apple’s streaming-heavy package.

That development led me down the proverbial online rabbit hole, where I found the speech from former President (and Michigan football player) Gerald Ford’s inauguration after the fall of Richard Nixon in 1974.

That speech is best known for the quip that ultimately helped tank Ford’s short-lived presidency (along with his ill-timed pardon of the aforementioned Nixon, but I digress).

In that speech, Ford says the following:

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.

Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher Power, by whatever name we honor Him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy.

The problem for Ford, as with any tragic protagonist throughout history, is that the future the 38th President of the United States laid out in his speech was full of unkind feats that would topple their turn at the helm.

For Kliavkoff, the Pac-12’s 390-plus-day nightmare of trying to cobble together enough media rights money to keep 10 disparate institutions united by one shared interest (money), was bound for failure from the get-go.

As in Ford’s case nearly 50 years ago, there’s no salve that George could pull to cobble the men and women he was tasked with leading together.

In Kliavkoff’s case, it’s looking more and more likely that the blind hubris (or naïve optimism, if you’d rather) that the former MGM executive’s shown during his fleeting media appearances will cost the man his current job.

Just as in Ford’s case way back in the mid-’70s, there’s no safety net for a leader who leads their flock into oblivion, though I’m sure there’s a Las Vegas mainstay that’ll take Kliavkoff back in the long run.

For now, however, there’s no denying that Kliavkoff’s nightmare (and that of each of the remaining nine conference presidents) will live on in infamy, just like that Ford speech from early August of 1974.