Did the commish botch the expansion ?

I'm afraid SEC will get five extras and the other two will go to maybe the B10 and somewhere else. 

Getting back to the original question posed in this thread: Did the commish botch the expansion?

If I understand it correctly, the poaching fee for the Pac 12 in the original scheduling agreement covering the '24 season was $10 million for each school poached from the MWC plus an escalator clause of $500,000 per school after the first. Plus there are exit fees governing the MWC itself, right around $17 -- 18 million per school. 

So, by my calculations, the Pac 12 owes the MWC:

$10,000,000 + 10,500,000 + 11,000,000 + 11,500,000 + 12,000,000 = $55,000,000 in poaching fees and 

5 x $17 -- 18 million = $85 -- $90 million in exit fees if the Pac 12 is to pay the exit fee for each school. 

A total of $145 million potentially owed to the MWC and the Pac still doesn't have the 8 teams required to be a conference. If the Pac doesn't win it's suit, and I'm not at all convinced it will, that's $145 million that the MWC has to entice it's seven remaining members to stay. 

It's not looking good right now. And every day that an 8th member does not appear makes it seem a little worse. 

That sounds like a botch to me.  

It will be reduced, but we still owe them a chunk of change in the millions as do the departing schools

We have filed suit to eliminate that $55 mil poaching fee, and there's a decent chance we'll win.

We don't know how much of the exit fees will be paid by the Pac-12, and how much by each departing schools.  This could also potentially be paid over time, and not all at once.  We don't know the details of the exit fee breakdowns.

I know we're all hoping that the Pac wins its poaching lawsuit, but I'm not sold that it is likely to happen. And if it doesn't, we really screwed ourselves out of a lot of money.

The Pac 2 probably should have realized long ago that an invite to a P4 was not happening and should have just done the reverse merger with the WMC. That way, the biggest chunk of the Pac 12 assets could have been kept by OSU and WSU with some going as an enticement to the MWC members to join our conference. No hard feelings anywhere. 

Now, it looks like 10s, if not 100s of millions of Pac dollars is going to the weakest part of the MWC so they can rebuild their conference. It doesn't look good at this point.  

We are a G5 conference. It's not like we're the Big Ten and these schools aren't coming. The AAC schools wanted the Pac to pay the bulk of their departure penalty. Screw that. If you're gonna join us, you're gonna have to prove you want to be here and that means skin in the game.

The Pac-2 is not going to pay the entire exit fee for the MWC schools. It may pay some (supposedly the offer to the AAC was $2.5 mil) but not anywhere near the whole $17 million. Nor will the Pac pay anywhere near $10 million in poaching penalties for each team.

The $145 million fee bandied about here by some is ridiculous, IMHO. Maybe we'll pay about $30-40 million tops. Which is still less than the $65 million we received from the departing 10 and had specifically set aside for rebuilding the league.

"Every day that an 8th member does not appear makes it seem a little worse."

We existed as a 2-team conference for almost a year. A few extra days, or even a week, with seven teams is no big deal.

I do believe if we can wrap up Gonzaga the 8th team becomes much easier to land.

Again, I'm optimistic. I realize that's an unusual mindset for a Beaver fan. 

Not buying that the Pac 12 w/OSU, WSU, Fresno, Boise, CSU, USU, SDSU, and virtually anyone else we can pick up is worth no more than a conference with AFA, UNLV, UNM, UWyo, UNR, SJSU, UHI, and whoever else they can get.