President of Pac-12 school says other conferences have unified against SEC
By Keith Farner
Published:
The SEC’s expansion to include Texas and Oklahoma has really fired up conference commissioners and college presidents around the country. That group includes Washington State President Kirk Schulz, who said some explosive comments about the SEC this week.
“If we add teams just to try to keep up with somebody else but those teams don’t grow our revenue base, do we really need to add them?’’ Schulz, one of three presidents on the Pac-12 CEO Group’s agenda-driving executive committee, told the Mercury News. “What the SEC has done is unify the other conferences in a way that nothing else could have, in terms of working together. A lot of people now are very concerned about the predatory nature of the SEC. More presidents are talking. There’s a lot of back and forth.”
Reporter Jon Wilner also pointed out that Schulz was a university president in the Big 12 (Kansas State) during the expansion cycle a decade ago, when the conference lost Colorado to the Pac-12, Nebraska to the Big Ten and Missouri and Texas A&M to the SEC.
Attitudes and emotions have shifted since the initial news broke two weeks ago about Texas and Oklahoma moving to the SEC, he said.
“I sensed that in the aftermath of the announcement, there was some panic,’’ he said. “But I don’t think that’s the case any longer. I have talked to presidents around the country, and what I’ve found is that people are taking a step back and taking a deep breath. They’re saying, ‘Let’s not rush into it and make a hasty judgment.’ Nobody is on a deadline. At the same time, we don’t want to have our head in the sand and just see where everything is one year later and hope it worked out for the best.”
A former newspaper veteran, Keith Farner is a news manager for Saturday Down South.
