When its lease expires next year, the Pac-12 is leaving its home office in downtown San Francisco.

League commissioner George Kliavkoff announced the news on Tuesday. The decision was approved unanimously by the Pac-12 Board of Directors and is being championed as a way to “deliver more revenue back to member universities to support student-athletes.”

John Canzano reported recently the Pac-12 paid $92 million in rent over the last 11 years for the couple of floors its league headquarters operated out of downtown San Francisco. That worked out to just under $700,000 a month, and the estimated savings that can be redistributed back to Pac-12 universities could be upwards of $7 million per school over the next decade, per Canzano.

WFH is the new way of business as the country transitions out of pandemic-forced shutdowns and the like. The Pac-12 is breaking a bit of ground here relative to its peers. Employees who are not part of a production team can work fully remote and live where they want, as long as they’re in the Mountain or Pacific time zones.

The league is expected to set up a small production facility at a yet-to-be-determined location by June 2023 to continue producing content and broadcasts for the Pac-12 Network.

“The Pac-12 is committed to best supporting our employees by providing a work environment that accommodates today’s modern world and gives our employees maximum flexibility to live and work where they want, while still fostering collaboration among staff and our valued member institutions,” Kliavkoff said in a statement. “We are also committed to ongoing best-in-class production of Pac-12 events.

“We are excited for what this new remote and flexible work environment can do to support our employees, and for the new ways it will allow for us to reinvest in our member universities so that they can best support student-athletes.”