They appeared on a three-screen video chat, the modern equivalent of an old-school mob meeting designed to run out the competition. And at its heart, that’s what this was trying to be.
An attempted act of aggression responding to a perceived act of aggression. This is where we are at in college athletics, this wonderful, beautiful, ridiculous American creation that is being done in by all sorts of classic American themes: greed, politics, money, tribalism and hurt feelings.
So there they were, George Kliavkoff representing the Pac-12 out in California, Kevin Warren representing the Big Ten from Chicago and Jim Phillips of the ACC down in the Carolinas.