Larry Scott strode up to the podium at Pac-12 Media Day on July 26, 2011, a conquering hero.

He’d only been on the job 2 years and 4 months, but he’d led a tidal wave of momentum for the venerated conference out west, which was coming off the heyday of the Pete Carroll era at USC and entering the Chip Kelly era years at Oregon. A year earlier, the league had expanded by two schools — Colorado and Utah — and, just under three months earlier, Scott had announced a landmark, 12-year, $3 billion television rights deal with ESPN and Fox that, at the time, was the richest in college athletics history.

It increased the conference’s media rights package from $60 million per year to $250 million, and even better, the league was launching the Pac-12 Network, which promised innovation and ownership that, to Pac-12 presidents and media, was considered a new frontier for college athletics.

“I think it’s fair to say 18 months ago, never in our wildest dreams would we have envisioned being in the position that we’re in today,” Arizona State athletic director Lisa Love said at the time.

Scott was a heroic pioneer that day, bringing word of his visions and successes to the media who had descended upon FOX Studios in Los Angeles. It was a setting straight out of a movie. Literally. You half expected Lucille Ball to come shake his hands.

“First, let me start by welcoming you to the FOX Studios here in Los Angeles, the first time we’re holding our media day here,” Scott said. “In Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the world, an important center for the Pac-12 conference. We’re thrilled to be here as we get ready to kick off with promises what promises to be a very exciting 2011 season. I want to thank FOX for adjusting their production and other schedules to make their facility available for us today. With all of the iconic leaders and amazing performers in the history of success that have originated from these studios, we’re thrilled to be able to talk about a similar level of excellence in the Pac-12 and in our football programs, and this is truly an ideal setting for this event. Especially given the recent announcement of the extension of our partnership with FOX and ESPN, we’re thrilled to be co-hosting you all with our partners at FOX here today to celebrate the future of this conference.

But this is a new era for the conference as we embrace the future, and the addition of Colorado and Utah very much helped us secure a landmark media agreement that’s going to provide for unprecedented exposure nationally for the conference. So this wonderful story of this academic and athletic excellence is going to be better told and more broadly told than it’s been before. And importantly, this media contract will provide greatly enhanced revenue stream at a very challenging time for our universities. Our goal is that all of our athletic departments are going to be able to operate on a going-forward basis and self-sustaining, and not have to depend or draw upon the vital resources needed by the university for further needs. And this media contract has very much put us on the path of our schools being able to do so.”

Over the next decade, Scott’s façade came crumbling down, culminating with his removal as commissioner in 2021.

His vision for a robust Pac-12 Network that filled homes across the country never came to fruition, with DirecTV proving to be a thorn in his side for years.

Eventually, the other Power 5 conferences caught up in their rights packages, and the league started to become outpaced by its biggest competition.

Yet Scott was steadfast. For 10 years, he owned Pac-12 Media Day, never wavering in his confidence, even as things failed to materialize.

In his own words, here’s a look back at some of his key statements across the years, words that have come back to haunt the now-Pac-4.

2013 Pac-12 Media Day: In-Direct messaging

It doesn’t sound great to have to backpedal on distribution promises just a year into the launch of a network, but DirecTV would not budge. It would be a sticking point for years.

“With a month to go before kick‑off of Pac‑12 football I want to be up front with our fans who are still able ‑‑ still unable to watch the network, especially those with DirecTV. As recently as last week, our team discussed a deal with DirecTV that’s fundamentally the same as the 50-plus other distributors that are carrying the network. We’re still at an impasse with DirecTV, no closer than we were last football season. Unfortunately, it’s become clear they don’t intend to take the network this year and with a month to go before the launching of the football season we want our fans to know that because they’ve got ample opportunities with other distributors to carry the network.”

2014 Pac-12 Media Day: Misplaced priorities?

One of the gripes of many Pac-12 fans and media members was the league’s long touting of its academic and Olympic sport success, to the detriment of its football and men’s basketball spotlight. Year after year, Scott focused on things that weren’t major revenue generators.

“A few stats for you: Only 2% of Pac‑12 student‑athletes will be drafted by the NFL. Only 3% of Pac‑12 basketball student‑athletes go on to play in the NBA. The fact is, almost all of the 7,000 Pac‑12 student‑athletes are never going to play professional sports or certainly not long enough to actually make a living at it. My focus is on the vast majority, that 97 or 98% of our student‑athletes for whom this experience of being a student‑athlete in the Pac‑12 is transformative. It’s providing access, providing opportunity, that’s going to allow them to be more successful in life than they would have otherwise. We have to do right for these student‑athletes and not design a system around the 2%.”

2015 Pac-12 Media Day: A global vision

Another big gripe: Instead of solidifying things stateside, the Pac-12 embarked an ambitious initiative to expand its brand in China. Two years later, LiAngelo Ball and two of his UCLA teammates were arrested in Hangzhou for allegedly stealing sunglasses from a Louis Vuitton store. So much for brand awareness.

“Now as the front porch of our universities, we believe that athletics can play a big role here. So at the Pac‑12, we’re reaching out to the Pacific Rim, and that is a logical extension of our growth, and it compliments our universities initiatives around athletics, academics, alumni relations and strategic partnerships we already have in China and in other countries. So after a series of important exchanges and exhibition games over the last few years, the Pac‑12 will make history this November with a regular season basketball game in Shanghai, between the Washington Huskies and the Texas Longhorns. The global vision does far more than just extend the Pac‑12’s reach overseas, and this event will be more than just one basketball game. It provides another way in which our member institutions can deepen their academic ties to new regions of the world, and it promises to be a seminal educational, academic and cultural exchange for our student‑athletes.”

2016 Pac-12 Media Day: A new frontier

In 2016, the Pac-12 announced that Frontier Communications would launch the Pac-12 Network for FiOS TV customers in Southern California. It did not move the needle an inch, particularly as DirecTV was completely uninterested. Read below and cringe.

“Our team is regularly reaching out to DirecTV trying to engage them, convince them to carry the Pac-12 Network. No news on that this morning, and we continue to be disappointed and frustrated that our fans have gone for four seasons, and those that are with DirecTV have been deprived of all the content that’s on it. So while our team will continue to knock on the door and push and offer them the same opportunity that over 75 different distributors have said yes to, we are also focusing our efforts with our current partners in trying to get more better distribution, as evidenced by the Comcast and Cox announcements this morning. So we continue to improve distribution with our current partners.

“We continue to add new distributors. The addition of the former Verizon FiOS subs here in Southern California, now with Frontier, is a major add for our Southern California fans, and in this rapidly-changing media landscape, we are going to continue to be focused on new emerging ways to distribute our content, for example, with Twitter and Facebook that we announced today. We will keep knocking on that door and pushing as hard as we can, but also concentrating on the 75 distributors that we have and new forms of distribution, as well, and we’re hopeful that DirecTV eventually picks it up.”

2016 Pac-12 Football Championship Game: A changing landscape

After saying earlier in a group huddle that the Pac-12 Network had “met expectations,” he was pressed further …

“From our original business plan. Expectations change. I’m well aware of that, and that’s fine. But from when we set out to do the network, it’s overachieved what we initially thought it might. But I’m not going to tell you right now people are satisfied. We want to stay competitive. We’d love to be generating the same revenue if not more revenue than the Big Ten or SEC. So I certainly don’t want you to take my comments suggesting anyone’s complacent or anyone’s satisfied. We’re striving for more, for sure. Those two things can exist. We could have done better than we thought we’d do, but the landscape’s changed.”

2017 Pac-12 Media Day: Embracing #Pac12AfterDark

With many on the East coast asleep, Pac-12 night games became appointment television for sickos across the country just aching to see Washington State go down to the wire with Oregon in Mike Leach’s glory days. It was a catch-22 for Scott: Great games, great drama, no one east of Texas still watching.

“What we’ve discovered with our media partners is our ability to play more night games has created value. It’s created value for our media partners that’s gone back to our schools in the form of exclusive and prominent national windows. And while it’s absolutely true that when we play night games, and about a third of our Saturday games are at night — I want to make that clear. There’s a perception that all of our games are at night, two-thirds of them are what you would consider during day. But of the third of our games that are at night, while there is less East Coast viewership, we dominate it. We’ve got the most market share.

“While somewhat counterintuitive, the research actually shows some of our best-rated games are 7 p.m., 7:30 p.m. kickoff times. If it’s a compelling game, there are a lot of fans still watching TV, and we dominate the market share at that hour. Oftentimes more eyeballs than if we’ve got a game kicking off at 12:30 or 1:00 up against 15 other games on all the myriad of media channels that exist.”

2017 Pac-12 Football Championship Game: CFP’d off

The Pac-12 had teams in 2 of the first 3 College Football Playoffs — 2014 and 2016 — and none since. He was asked if 1 appearance every 2years was sufficient. Little did he know …

“I don’t think it bothers me at this point in time. I think if we get to year 10 or 12 and that’s a trend, I might feel differently about it. But I think our league is very strong. I think it’s deep. There are some particular circumstances that went into teams having 2 losses rather than 1 loss this year that were tough. But, yeah, it’s very elusive and hard challenge to be one of the top 4 teams making the Playoffs. When I look across at the overall strength of our programs, the coaches that we have, the facilities that we have, the student-athletes that we’re recruiting, I’ve got no reason to believe Pac-12 football isn’t in a great place.”

2018 Pac-12 Media Day: Doubling down

With the Pac-12 headquartered in San Francisco, Scott just loved to talk about Silicon Valley and technology. In 2018, he recognized that Apple — among others — was entering the live sports marketplace.

“I’d like to finish with some reflections on some of the broader macro trends impacting not only collegiate sports but sports generally. The first is the changing face of the media landscape, which is evolving at an incredible pace. The change reflects the transformation and how viewers are consuming all forms of content. You’re all aware of the mergers of proposed mergers among some of the major media companies in our country. Efforts to attain the scale to compete with the technology and content companies, from Apple, to Google, to Amazon, Netflix, Facebook and others, they are slowly but surely increasing their investment in live sports. Nobody knows who will come out on top or exactly what our consumers will gravitate to in the future in terms of how they consume sports, but it’s clear that the rights to carry premium live sports are increasing in value and that we will need to deliver content in new ways, through entities that may not even exist today.”

2019 Pac-12 Media Day: Reading the tea leaves

Five years go (!), Scott made it clear he understood the land was shifting beneath his feet. He first mentioned getting into discussions regarding the Pac-12’s next round of media rights negotiations early.

“Overall, when it comes to media, I think we’re all noticing there’s an unprecedented shift occurring in the media landscape and in consumer habits. While this creates uncertainty, it also creates tremendous opportunity, and because we own and control all of our media rights and have all of our rights coming up in 2024, we continue to feel very good about how we’re positioned for the future. While we recognize during these changing times and paradigm shifts, we’ve faced headwinds on distribution with the Pac-12 Networks, as a whole when it comes to media, we’ve got strategic patience and we’re going to be able to take advantage of these positive media trends, new players in the marketplace, and the increasing value that we see in our rights, especially as these new players from technology and media come in and are aggressively bidding for sports rights.

“We’ve recently been through an exploration process looking at potential strategic media partners, even before 2024. We’ve been delighted with the great interest that’s been generated and attractive bids and valuations that we received from a diverse group of some of the most respected media companies as well as new technology players. And as of today, we continue to narrow the field of companies that we’re talking to that could provide important strategic value and revenue to our members. We may or may not ultimately do something before 2024, but we’ve got the optionality to be able to consider these things because of our ownership and control.”

He was later asked about the Pac-12 falling behind in revenue, and reiterated the conference’s strategy.

“I don’t know if it’s the biggest issue, but certainly a significant issue is timing. It wasn’t very long ago in 2012 when we signed our media deals that we had the largest media contracts in the country. Other conferences’ TV deals have since come up, other conferences have expanded and renegotiated TV deals or started networks. So some of this is just timing. And come 2024, you’ll see the league tables in revenue, as people like to follow them at the conference level, shift again, and you’re going to see the Pac-12 skyrocket up. I can’t tell you right now exactly where we’ll land, but I think it’ll be impressive.”

2019 Pac-12 Championship Game: Feeling the pressure

Falling further and further behind in the college football arms race, Scott was getting a little hot around the collar by 2019. The Pac-12 Network had not lived up to billing, and Scott was hearing about it.

“I don’t think we anticipated the level of angst we’d hear from fans. I think that is a learning (experience). I’m confident as we approach our strategy going forward, that will weigh heavy in whether it’s in the tradeoffs with the ESPN or FOX’s of the world, whether that leads you to license rights to other broadcasters that don’t have the same shelf space issue, don’t see it being a premium for you to play at night.”

*****

And that was … kind of just it.

With the pandemic throwing the 2020 season into chaos, there was no media day in a true sense. Scott’s last major public appearance was the 2019 Pac-12 title game. In January 2021, Scott was removed from his position after earning more than $50 million in his role. He received a sizeable severance, even as financial misappropriations during his watch led the Pac-12 Network to owe Comcast $50 million in overpayments.

That was just the cherry on top of the crap sundae. Big talk, big promises, terrible distribution and a wave of worries on his wake.

George Kliavkoff took over in mid-2021, with a terrible mess to clean up.

He couldn’t.

And just over two years after Scott bid goodbye, so did 8 Pac-12 teams.