PACIFIC 10 CONFERENCE IN TROUBLE : Financial Woes Cause Split in Conference : As Costs Rise and TV Revenues Decrease, Will Seven Decide to Head South?

Can The Chicken turn it around for Oregon State? Can a covered stadium do the trick for Oregon? Will UCLA bite the bullet and lop a volleyball team from its program in case the aforementioned Chicken and stadium fail to do the job?

Moreover: Does Keith Jackson know where Corvallis, Ore., is? Why doesn’t it matter?

Also: What about this idea of a Pac-7 Conference, anyway? About time?

The answers later. In the meantime, in case you haven’t heard, the Pac-10 Conference is in big trouble, Capital T and all that. Possibly the economic problems within the conference, where even the more successful programs routinely run up annual operating deficits of $400,000, portend problems across the country.

But for the moment, the split between the haves and have-nots in the Pac-10 is playing like a prime-time soap, the source of tension, as it is within any TV family, money.

There is not enough of it, basically. Of course, you’ll hear that across the country. Ever since the Supreme Court deregulated network television’s coverage of college football, the money has been slowing. There are a couple of reasons for this, one of them the fact that TV sports has become an increasingly soft market for the advertising dollar, the other that the colleges lost a lot of their leverage when they had to negotiate as conferences and individuals instead of the monolithic NCAA.

For whatever reason, college football has found that its TV money, in a time when other costs were rising, was going down, down, down. This has come as a shock, because between 1982 and 1985, the network money kept going up, up, up. In 1982, it was $58 million from the two networks. In 1983, the NCAA gathered $64 million. In the next two years, it was raised to $68 million and $72 million.

Last year, college football was paid $43 million for its TV exposure.

“Let me put it to you this way,” says UCLA Athletic Director Peter Dalis. “In 1983 we went into Athens, (Ga.), an important game, and that was worth $1.1 million. The very next year, post-Supreme

Court decision, we play Nebraska in a similar situation. That game was worth $800,000. That’s a significant hit.”

And meanwhile, expenses go up. Title IX means that institutions that once had spent as little as $50,000 on women’s sports are now spending up to $1.5 million. Tuition and room and board increases for the financial-aid packages go up, as well. UCLA, for example, faces an added bill of $100,000 in increased rooming charges for its scholarship athletes this year.

So it goes in college athletics. But the economics are exacerbated in the Pac-10 because there is something called revenue sharing among the 10 teams. This sounds very democratic, but in a conference that is very much divided in ability to generate revenue, it may also be unfair. Depending on whom you talk to, of course.

Oregon State, for example, was on television just once last year and has zero anticipation of being on even that much this year, a loss of up to $200,000 to its own athletic budget. Yet UCLA, which was on television seven times last season and anticipates being on six times this year, must contribute a cut of its TV money to each of its Pac-10 partners, enriching them as well each time the Bruins go on television.

Another example involves the gate money. Under a new provision, each school must hand over a minimum of $125,000 to the visiting team (it’s up from the $75,000 minimum earlier this month). UCLA, USC and most of the other schools will easily make that minimum at its home games and will, in fact, probably pay more to the visitor. But in games at Oregon State, Oregon or Washington State, it can expect no more than the minimum for now.

Meaning, when all the numbers are crunched, that some schools giveth and others taketh. At least three of the Northwest schools--Oregon State, Oregon, Washington State--are being subsidized to some extent by the seven larger schools.

The three Northwest schools, not too surprisingly, argue that we’re all in this together. Washington State Athletic Director Dick Young, whose program has been losing at least $500,000 a year and whose football team would have failed to produce a gate large enough to satisfy the new $125,000 minimum four times in the last two years, has argued that the member schools should “bite the bullet” as he has done and pare down expenses. Drop programs, in other words.

Otherwise, the consequences of the other schools starving “us to the point where we’re no longer competitive,” as he insisted at the recent Pac-10 meetings, is to “cut off their noses to spite their faces.”

Some of the others aren’t that sure it matters. They don’t like the idea of other schools dictating their athletic destiny. At Stanford, there is a philosophy of maintaining a diversified athletic program, with 30 different sports. “What we do is expensive,” admits Stanford Athletic Director Andy Geiger. “But it’s our choice to have that many sports.” Stanford surely would pay its way but the revenue sharing, even when adjusted somewhat in favor of the stronger programs this year, means that it has a $250,000 athletic budget deficit. “We’re not excited to see dollars we earn flow into much smaller programs,” he says. “It’s hard for us to think about subsidizing the Northwest schools when we’re facing deficits of our own trying to run broad-based programs.”

While mindful that the Northwest schools face special problems--small population centers, unpredictable weather, even an economic depression caused by a slowdown in the timber industry--there still is not an overwhelming sympathy if it means cuts at home.

UCLA might be more inclined to generosity, if it could just afford it. But even with a football team that has landed in a Jan. 1 bowl the last four years, UCLA has accumulated an athletic budget deficit of $2 million in those same four years. If anything, athletic success seems to mean financial distress. “Los Angeles is a fragile market to begin with,” Dalis says, enumerating all the competing entertainments in the area. “Plus we’re finding that the networks and (TV) syndicators will show USC and UCLA increasingly. It may be just an accident of geography; we’re in a large market.

“So the interesting thing is that even though we’ve had a great deal of success on Jan. 1, we have sold less season tickets this year than in 1985 by about 350. Some have said that’s a result of having only four home games this season. But I think part of it has to do with the fact that you can now anticipate seeing UCLA on TV.”

Like Stanford, UCLA likes a diversified athletic program and fields teams in 23 sports. “At Washington State, Dick Young says his way was to reduce sports. ‘We had to do that, so can you.’ But I don’t think Washington State should dictate our destiny. Anyway, you have to look at the long term and I don’t think cutting sports is the direct solution. That only goes so far. You still have buildings to heat and grass to mow,” whether there is a field hockey team to play on it or not.

The direct solution, as far as Dalis is concerned is to return more of the money to those who generate it. “I would like to see schools like UCLA get more of the income they generate,” Dalis says. As of now, the TV split in a conference game allows just 32% of the money per participant, with the other eight members getting 4.5% each. “We would like to get more of that. I’d like to see the TV income treated the same as the gate. What we had proposed is, once you get to a certain level, you keep the rest. That provides the incentive.”

The only other alternative, of course, is for the Northwest schools to get better and more profitable. Is this possible? Washington State has been surprisingly competitive yet remains a big loser at the box office. Still optimism abounds.

At Oregon State, where the football program has suffered on the field and at the box office (like Washington State, Oregon State would have failed to meet the new minimum guarantee four times in the last two years), Athletic Director Lynn Snyder radiates a hopefulness that would seem unwarranted, even as he anticipates another budget deficit.

“Our problem has been tied basically to non-competitive football,” he says. “I see that changing. The other thing, I believe our three (Northwest) programs need to get some state help. Many institutions get tuition and fee waivers for athletes and also get some help for women’s athletics. Fee waivers would certainly put us in the position where we could feel very comfortable.”

But the football program is the key, he admits. To get the conference doormat off the ground, Snyder has hired pass-oriented Dave Kragthorpe to coach the team, billed these days as Air Express. A passing team does two things, Snyder believes. One is win football games, particularly for a school that can’t competitively recruit the behemoths. The other, which may be more important, is to sell tickets.

“In a similar situation when I was at Marshall, I hired a coach that basically liked to throw the football,” Snyder said. “It attracted people. I remember a game when we lost, 38-26, but the comments in the stands were all positive comments. It was exciting.”

Snyder is hopeful that a little excitement can turn it around. “It’s a funny thing in this business,” he says. “You can get well in a hurry. You get off to a good start, to a bowl game, the NCAA tournament, you suddenly have a lot of money. I saw it happen very rapidly at West Virginia in about 1980. West Virginia had a sizable deficit. The next year, with two or three TV appearances, it turned around just like that. The next year, the athletic department actually gave money back to the university.”

Snyder is not putting all the responsibility on the football team but is giving a lot of it to his marketing department. He’s trying to attract corporate interest by providing tents for pre-game activities. There will be roving bands. Also, the Chicken has been booked for the Stanford game.

Shrugs Andy Geiger at Stanford: “They’re pretty resourceful. But it’s a self-help world.”

If none of this works? It’s obvious, isn’t it? While Dalis admits “there is not much sympathy” for a smaller conference and all athletic directors agree that there is no immediate likelihood of a new alignment, some grumbling about the current size of the conference can be heard.

Both Geiger and Dalis feel that a 10-team conference is “unwieldly,” with its round-robin format. “Also, it’s a long way from Pullman to Tuscon,” Geiger says.

And, too, UCLA experiences a problem with the conference schedule in its basketball program. Dalis has found that the networks, which like to televise the traditional intersectional rivalry games such as UCLA-Notre Dame, now want to televise those games on non-traditional weekends. What worked in the past won’t work anymore as the networks feel it is very difficult to support advertising during NFL play. So it wants to show those games the first weekend of January and the first in March.

“But we’re obliged to play our conference schedule at that time,” Dalis says.

Whenever anything besides a full Pac-10 conference is mentioned, there is quick rebuttal with the idea that it is an academic conference as well.

“This association is critical to the institutions well beyond athletics,” says Tom Hansen, conference commissioner. “As the largest grouping of institutions on the Pacific coast, it’s very important. The schools use the conference structure in lots of ways outside of athletics.

But be assured this will not be a tremendous factor in keeping the 10 in Pac-10. Certainly nobody believes that the A in the Pac-10 stands for academics. Anyway, Dalis points out, the schools managed to graduate students when it was just the Pac-8 before Arizona and Arizona State joined.

For now the Northwest schools are determined to hang with the rest of the conference. As Washington State’s Dick Young said, “We’ll spend whatever it takes to stay in the Pac-10. They can’t drive us out. It is too important to us as an institution to remain.”

So it is that they go about improving programs, marketing and stadiums.

But the others are equally adamant about directing their own destinies and they wonder whether continued tinkering with the splits is the long-term solution. Their patience would seem to be running thin.

Whether this coming season generates more money or still more tension within the conference is anybody’s guess. But unless more money than rain falls from the skies in the Northwest, look for the rift to widen in coming years. The sides have already been chosen.