David Shaw reveals that Stanford got caught sitting and waiting in conference realignment
The collapse of the Pac-12 is a moment that decades from now we will look back at and reminisce of the time college football had a conference out West.
For now, the college football world is still in shock as to what happened to the Pac-12, and are left wondering what will happen to the four programs left over. One of those four schools that was left behind is Stanford. A program that is a top academic institution in the world, and is also home to the best athletic department in the country.
They have been linked to the ACC, but there are still some major questions as to where their final landing spot will be. Former head coach David Shaw, who is the winningest coach in program history that stepped down following this past season and is now an analyst for the NFL Network joined The Rich Eisen Show to discuss what went wrong.
"It's a new era right now, and if you don't play by the rules that everybody else plays by and you sit and wait... you are left out." Shaw said. "And that is where the conference is and that's where my school is right now. Waiting for something else to happen that hourly can salvage something..."
He also touched on the fact that he thinks that after this wave of media rights deals is over that college football will revert back to having some regionality.
"I can't help but think of the legacy of the conference. I have a little bit of pie in the sky that once all this stuff settles and seven, eight years from now when all these deals are about to be resigned again that maybe somehow we can form this conference back again, but for now it's tough times out here on the West Coast."
When asked if he saw any warning signs in his final years about the Pac-12's future, Shaw did not hold back about how dire the situation appeared to be.
"More than warning signs, it felt like there were bombs going off around us. We all knew that the first contract as the Pac-12 was right around my first year...the big contract and we didn't get a lot of that money that was promised. The DirecTv deal never came through, a lot of things didn't happen. So that first deal was just not what we hoped it to be and all of the conferences signed better deals than ours, and we signed a longer term deal so they actually re-upped theirs before we got to ours, so it was just bad on both sides. The bottom line was we knew school by school we were getting less money than everybody, less coverage than everybody, and we were hoping this deal was going to be much better and more lucrative and keep the conference together..."
For Stanford, they are left waiting for approval by members of the ACC to join the conference, but there is no real sense of whether or not they will get the invitation. Brand of the Pac-12 is waiting to see what happens with Stanford and Cal. If they leave that likely marks the end of the conference, if they remain it may be rebuilt.
