Q&A: Pac-12 commissioner Teresa Gould
Q&A: Pac-12 commissioner Teresa Gould
The new commissioner talks about her goals for Oregon State and Washington State, Playoff expansion, revenue sharing, honoring Bill Walton and much more.
The Pac-12 didn’t want to sit on the sideline during talking season, and who can blame them? So instead of a traditional media day, the conference decided to go ahead Wednesday night with “After Hours with the Beavs and Cougs.”
The cocktail reception and interview session with representatives from the schools and the conference is conveniently located in Las Vegas on the Day 2 of Big 12 media days and Day 1 of Mountain West Conference media days, making life convenient for the media horde already in Sin City.
First-year Pac-12 commissioner spoke with The Inside Zone ahead of the event by phone, and she had plenty to say.
(The following Q&A has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
How did this evening, this event, come together from your end?
Teresa Gould: Obviously, as we started to prepare for the football season, and really as a team, started to talk through what these two programs needed from us — what kind of support, what level of services, what was the season going to look like? It obviously became a priority from a storytelling perspective. We said, ‘Look, these are two programs that have competed at the highest level, and we want to make sure that they're staying front of mind from a national media perspective, we want to make sure they're staying relevant and that we're providing opportunities to support these student-athletes and tell their stories.’ That being said, we knew that maybe a traditional media day, the way that it has always looked in the past, probably didn't make a lot of sense. We don't have Pac-12 Networks anymore, and with just the two programs, we thought some big, elaborate media day that was really focused only on content creation probably wasn't the path forward. And so it's really going to be a fun evening where we're going to celebrate the past, present and future. And we've got some really cool, creative videos that we've done with some of our media partners, and we're going to have some former NFL players, obviously both head coaches, student-athletes, myself, and just a really fun cocktail reception and some Q and A and an opportunity to have a good time and really celebrate these programs. So I think the media will still get what they need, but it's definitely going to look and feel a little bit different.
Did you give any thought, just given the relationship that you guys have right now, to partnering with the Mountain West Conference or having these two programs go there?
TG: No, I don't think we really talked about integrating or partnering in a formal way. Certainly we're partnering with them on a lot of things right now because of the football scheduling agreement, and we're so appreciative and grateful for that. I think it's going to be a great season in that regard, being able to play a lot of their top programs. But I think we wanted to respect and give them their space to focus on their programs. And I think we felt that our programs deserved our own space as well. So I think we knew that the proximity of having it the same day made a lot of sense. And so they've been going all day today. And the media that wanted to cover both could go from their event over to our cocktail reception tonight and hang out with us and have the benefit of covering both in a really, I think, efficient and easy way. But we didn't think it made sense to actually partner. We wanted to be fair to them as a conference and also fair to our programs.
On that same note, Gloria Nevarez, I'm sure you saw today, said it's trending toward a one-year extension of the football deal. Is there anything you can share from your side of things? And how would you characterize the status of that moving forward?
TG: Gloria and I worked very closely together. We have a long history. We worked together 25 years ago at Cal so we have a really long history together, and we're super appreciative of having this opportunity to give our student-athletes the schedule to compete against teams within our region, and those games are going to be really important, not only regionally, but nationally, from a CFP perspective. So we are starting to have conversations. There are timelines dictated in that agreement, and we all are anxious to find out what our schedule looks like for the fall of 2025, including the coaches and the student-athletes. It's an important thing for us to get resolved and for us to have clarity around. So I would imagine in the coming weeks, we'll make good progress on that. We've all been focused on spring meetings and season preparation and all that, but I think there's a good window here in July, over the next couple weeks, for Gloria and I to make some progress on that.
This might be a dumb question, but I am curious, from your seat, have things changed for you since July 1/the end of the semester, so to speak, now that the focus is essentially fully on Oregon State and Washington State?
TG: Yeah, 100 percent it's different. Really for my first 90 to 100 days, right, I started the last week of February, that's the busiest time of year. Starting with our two basketball championships, all the way through our baseball championship the last week of May. The thing that I described to people, Matt, was it was almost like there were three separate jobs or three separate workstreams going on at the same time. Because, on one hand, it was business as usual, right: 12 institutions, 24 sports, Pac-12 Networks, 850 live events, all the normal championships; we were doing most of the normal things that we typically would do, on one hand, so that was all happening. At the same time, there was a considerable amount of transitioning and wind down, and some of that was transitioning of people, staff. Some of that was transitioning of services and shutting some things down that weren't continuing, like the Pac-12 Networks. And then the third workstream was really like, Oh, we're continuing past July 1, and it's almost like a start-up. We need to prepare and build for that, too. Like, what do the services look like for two teams and for five sports and different media partners and all these things? So it definitely changed July 1, because the focus was exclusively on future-facing and providing these two programs with high-level support and service. And preparing for the various scenarios and strategy for the long-term future.