Pac-12 finally sets the death date for its biggest failure, will reportedly lay off 141 employees

A Pac-12 logo flag lines the course during the Pac-12 cross country championships at Chambers Creek Regional Park on Oct. 27, 2023, in University Place, Wash.

The knocking-at-death’s-door Pac-12 Conference is officially bringing an end to perhaps the biggest failure in sports broadcasting history: the Pac-12 Networks.

According to documents filed with labor officials, the conference plans to lay off 141 employees from its San Ramon office on a periodic basis starting on Jan. 5, nearly a year after the Pac-12 production center moved to that office from San Francisco. The layoffs will continue through June 28 — just before the end of the academic year and the conference’s media rights deal — and include broadcast engineers, numerous directors, an on-air host and senior producer, and multiple senior-level roles.

While the writing has been on the wall since schools began leaving for greener pastures at other athletic conferences, the final round of layoffs would officially close the final chapter on the heavily criticized Pac-12 Networks.

The network was launched in 2012 with seven channels and a lofty aspiration to provide conference members with significantly higher revenue shares from the $3 billion media rights deal it signed a year earlier. This would be accomplished through the conference maintaining total control of the network, and not having a distribution partner. Yet it was through that latter requirement that cracks began to show in those stated goals.

The network was pretty much impossible to find — a near-present-day staple of the product — causing it to lag behind its competition. As other conferences eventually caught up, or outright exceeded, financially with their respective rights deals, the Pac-12 continued to hemorrhage money because of how it mismanaged its own. Suddenly, the 70,000-square-foot office in SoMa looked like an example gratuitous overestimation of success rather than a sign of the network’s promising future.

Much of this fed into why all but two schools, Oregon State and Washington State, have left the Pac-12 for another conference. As the “Pac-2” battles through the courts to figure out their future, they’ll have to do so without this monument of incompetence. Given its history, perhaps that’s for the best.