Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott says don't dismiss the super conference idea

FORT WORTH, Texas — It was an improbable plot line: A former tennis player and executive — who went to Harvard and played on the grass courts at Wimbledon — was almost responsible for turning college football upside down.

Some might say that close counts only in horseshoes, but you can't help but feel that the bold expansion plan that Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott saw fall apart at the 11th hour Monday is just postponing the inevitable. It was, if you will, a peek at how the "super conference" concept will likely re-emerge at some point in the near future, perhaps with new alliances, but with the same underlying purpose of maximizing revenue for college athletics.

Scott, 45, represents a new wave of conference commissioner. He is not a football lifer, but a sports executive whose primary function is to "market and grow the game," the catchphrase that was prevalent at the ATP Tour in the 1990s, where Scott was a regional vice president overseeing Australia and Asia when he was only 24 and later became chief operating officer of the men's game. He eventually moved on to become chief executive officer with the WTA Tour, where he negotiated the most lucrative sponsorship and TV deals in the history of women's tennis.

I worked with Scott at the ATP, as vice president of communications from 1992 to August 1998. It was his marketing skills and big-picture view that prompted the presidents of the Pac-10 schools to hire him as commissioner in July 2009. The conference is a stalwart academically and does well across the board in athletics, but it was deemed in need of a more aggressive marketing approach.

In an era when funding for public institutions is being cut, endowments are shrinking and universities are demanding that the athletics department pay its own way, any source of new revenue is welcomed to help pay for all sports, from lacrosse to women's field hockey.

In the Pac-10, football coaches, and to some extent basketball coaches, felt that they were at a competitive imbalance with their schools earning about one-third of the TV revenue from its network contract than the Big Ten and SEC were getting.

But little did anyone suspect that, in an attempt to create a TV windfall through expansion, Scott almost initiated a college football revolution.

Of course, the first shot was fired by the Big Ten, which talked about expanding to 14 or 16 schools. As one college football insider said, "That's when all hell broke loose."