The why is easy: It was a top-down cash grab.

The Pac-12 presidents, aghast at the growing revenue gap and fearful of falling further behind peer conferences, instructed new commissioner Larry Scott to cut the best media rights deal possible in the spring of 2011.

On the other side of table, with checkbooks at-the-ready and airtime to fill, ESPN and Fox asked for the rights to televise an unprecedented number of football games at 7 p.m. Pacific or later.

Not only that, they wanted the flexibility to set the kickoff times for conference games either 12 or six days in advance, to ensure the best matchups would fill the choice windows.

Scott agreed, the presidents approved, the networks handed over $3 billion over 12 years, the night-game train left the station and everyone was happy.

Until they weren’t.

“One of the tradeoffs we made to maximize revenue for the schools and exposure for the schools resulted in more night games than I think our fans are comfortable with,” Scott explained this summer.

“And that’s a big source of frustration.”

So we’ve heard.

The story of Pac-12 night games is, to a large extent, the story of unintended consequences — of a cash grab that missed the eyeballs and an end result that has left many college football fans unaware of the, um, end results.

But there is good news for Pac-12 fandom: Scott hears your night-game pain.

He hears it, and he plans to make the concerns over late kickoffs a central part of the conference’s strategy when it negotiates a new media deal in several years.

“One of the things we’ve learned through the process is, we’ve got to be very sensitive to the impact on our TV agreements with fans, especially as there is a lot of pressure on fans coming out to games,’’ Scott said.

“So that’s another major consideration to keep our eye on as we think about the future.”

Should there have been greater consideration given to the impact of so many night games and unknown kickoff times back when Scott and his advisors crafted the current agreement with Fox and ESPN?

He was following the presidents’ lead, after all, and what did they know about media deals and 7:30 p.m. kickoffs and fan engagement carriage negotiations and audience data and 4 a.m. returns to campus.

The athletic directors might have sounded the alarm, but they weren’t involved in the strategy-setting or negotiations.

Then again, it’s unlikely that concerns raised by a few ADs would have prompted the presidents to change course — not with dollar signs in their eyes and $3 billion on the table and mounting deficits.

The new agreement took hold in the fall of 2012 and the cash rolled in, and then a funny thing happened: Reality.

“The big surprise with night games — and we had done night games prior to the current agreement, so they weren’t not totally foreign to us,’’ said Duane Lindberg, the associate commissioner for television.

“But what happened with new agreement that was kind of an unexpected consequence is the frequency where you get home games that are night games and road games that are night games.

“And the road games in the Pac-12 that are played at night — the big complaint we’ve heard is you get done and the plane doesn’t land until 3 or 4 a.m., which is a real disadvantage after playing a game and getting everybody home at that time and starting the week and preparing for a game.”

In 2010, prior to expansion, 15 games started at 7 p.m. or later on Pac-10 campuses and the schools had control of most kickoff times.

The agreement signed in 2011 resulted in dozens of night games — the exact number varies from year to year — and only the kickoff times for the early weeks, plus Thursday and Friday games, are known in advance.

ESPN and Fox were given total control; the Pac-12 was given an average of $250 million per year.

Some teams played night games on the road in back-to-back weeks.

Some teams played night games on the road three times in a month.

Some teams played eight night games a year.

Fans were unhappy about the late finishes and the uncertainty over start times: The six-day selections allocated to ESPN and Fox govern four of the 10 weekends of conference play.

Campus officials were frustrated because the combination of night games and kickoff uncertainty made selling tickets more difficult.

Coaches were concerned about the toll exacted by dead-of-night returns to campus from the long flights across the sprawling conference.

“It can turn into a significant grind,’’ said Lindberg, who discussed all aspects of football scheduling with the Hotline on a podcast published last week.

“These are things we do talk (about) all the time with our TV partners. When we foresee a night game issue coming up we say, ‘Hey, keep an eye on this institution, because they’re bearing the brunt of the night games.’’’

And nobody — nobody — was happy with the limited national audience that comes with starting at 10 or 10:30 p.m. Eastern.

Sure, the night windows provide the Pac-12 with competition-free opportunities. But the total available audience is reduced and the narrative-setting highlights shows are limited in scope by the time the Pac-12 finishes.

So significant was the frustration that the conference asked ESPN and Fox to cap the number of night games any one team could play in a season.

One guess as to how that went over.

“The tradeoff that was proposed by our TV partners … was a financial figure,” Lindberg said, “and it was significant enough that membership said it wasn’t an issue that we would explore anymore.”

The concerns might be mitigated if the Pac-12 Networks, which televise almost half the games owned by the conference (i.e., home games), had the coast-to-coast reach officials expected prior to launch.

But the networks have approximately 17 million subscribers, according to SNL Kagan, while their counterparts at the SEC and Big Ten have 50+ million.

The Hotline has given deep thought over the years to the exposure issues gnawing at the conference and concluded the problem isn’t the night games or the Pac-12 Networks’ low subscriber total.

Instead, it’s the compounding effect of both on a conference that starts every Saturday, every fall, two and three hours behind the country’s major population centers.

Combine the late starts on ESPN and Fox with the limited reach of the Pac-12 Networks, and too much Pac-12 football is seen by too few people far too often.

And we’ve got the numbers to prove it.

The Hotline examined the kickoff time and broadcast network for every Pac-12 game last season to determine the percentage available to a wide audience during peak national viewing hours.

There were 54 conference games and 36 non-conference games — 90 total.

However, not all were owned by the Pac-12. Let’s remove from our calculation the neutral site and non-conference road games and instead focus on the 77 games controlled by the conference and its TV partners.

Of those, 57 were either on the Pac-12 Networks (34) or started on ESPN/Fox at 7 p.m. Pacific or later (23).

In other words: 74 percent of the conference’s most marketable product was on a network with severely limited reach or on major networks during hours of greatly reduced viewership.

(The most-watched Pac-12 night game of last season, Arizona State-Michigan State, generated a 1.5 rating and 2.3 million viewers.

(Only five other games all season were 1.0 or better, according to the fabulous ratings database at sportsmediawatch.com.)

For a substantial portion of the college football world, it seems, three-quarters of the Pac-12 season was more concept than reality.

And it’s not changing anytime soon.

In fact, Scott said one reason the Pac-12 recently rejected offers to renew its TV deals was the very night games that have helped push the conference into an exposure corner in the first place.

“We’ve made a commitment to not extend or renew with any of our current partners (a deal) that would lock in even longer the night-time games,’’ Scott said.

Instead, the Pac-12 will wait until the the current agreement ends in the spring of 2024.

Potential partners in the digital space, Scott said, “are not going to be overly concerned with what their shelf space looks like and needing to slot the Pac-12 (at) night, which has been a great source of frustration.”

Until the fall of 2025, it’s status quo.

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