USC president reportedly sabotaged Pac-12 expansion before USC's move to Big Ten
With all the news of conference realignment taking the college football world by storm, there seems to be an extra wrinkle of information that drops everyday detailing how we got to this point, and the latest news might be the most painful for Pac-12 fans to hear.
As we know, USC and UCLA both are heading to the Big Ten but USC's president Carol Folt may have been playing a calculated game of chess this past year. According to the LA Times, when first-year Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff was taking calls from panicked Big 12 schools who were worried about their conference's future after news of Texas and Oklahoma leaving to join the SEC, Kliavkoff assembled a committee of three presidents and three athletic directors to decide whether or not to suggest expansion to the rest of the conference.
One of those members was USC president Carol Folt, who was not fond of the idea of adding teams and according to the LA Times' sources halted the talks. This led to the conference deciding to move on from the idea and not poach any Big 12 schools. A move that is now being interpreted as sabotage of the Pac-12, due to the fact USC is departing from the conference, and the same conference they could have poached from (The Big 12) is now in position to do the same to them.
Folt chose to not address the accusations, but USC's new coach Lincoln Riley did hint that he knew USC might have their sights set elsewhere at Pac-12 Media Day saying:
I had a little bit of a heads up with it,” Riley said. “We had conversations when I took the job, not specifically about the Big Ten, not about an imminent move, but we knew we were going to have to monitor the landscape of what’s going on. You have to be on the forefront, and so I’m glad our people were progressive enough to seize what I think is going to be a great opportunity. I certainly understand the reasons behind it and fully support it.”
With the dust of USC and UCLA's move settled, the remaining 10 schools have reiterated multiple times that they plan to stay together, but schools like Stanford, Oregon, and Washington are also viewed as potentially the next set of schools that could make the move to the Big Ten.
Had the Pac-12 gone through with expansion, they could have been one of the mega-conferences that college sports are destined to see and had their pick of the litter of Big 12 programs such as TCU, Oklahoma State, Kansas, or Baylor. However, thanks to Folt's persistence the conference chose not to, and is now in stay alive mode and may only be able to add Group of Five schools.
