Salaries for the Pac-12’s head football and men’s basketball coaches lag those of their peers, according to USA Today’s databases. In football, Washington’s Chris Petersen, the best-paid coach in the conference, is 19th over all; four conference head coaches make less than Louisiana State’s defensive coordinator does. In basketball, where salaries generally are smaller, league head coaches are paid more competitively, although big names in the A.C.C., the Big Ten and the Big 12 tend to make more than their counterparts in the Pac-12.

Kevin Blue, the athletic director at California-Davis, who was previously a senior associate athletic director at Stanford, said the SEC and the Big Ten “are setting the market” for coaching salaries.

Several of the conference’s former athletic directors have publicly accused Scott of being more concerned with pleasing his bosses — university presidents and chancellors — than supporting the directors themselves, who are ostensibly more in touch with the business end of college athletics.

One of the Pac-12’s biggest challenges is geography. College sports are a fundamentally easier sell in the vast spaces of the Midwest and the South than they are in the sun- and snow-kissed cities and landscapes of the West.

“There are other parts of the country where it doesn’t matter who your team is playing against, you’re going to fill a 90,000-seat stadium,” Scott said. “I don’t have one school like that.”

Similarly, several of Scott’s critics complain that the league’s media deal requires frequent Friday night and late Saturday football games, which can be tougher for fans to attend. League coaches, including Petersen, have raised this issue. But changing that is likely impossible, given that the conference’s universities are in the Mountain and Pacific time zones, and roughly seven in 10 television viewers in the United States live in the Central or Eastern time zones.

“If you want to get revenues at the same level, then you’ve got to have kickoffs in East Coast prime time,” said Lee Berke, a sports media consultant. “And unless your schools are located there, they will never be in that position.”