Dive Brief:

• Washington State University is among PAC-12 athletic conference schools that are using revenue from a TV contract to build better playing facilities for teams in a sports-based construction boom.
• The conference signed a 12-year deal with ESPN and Fox that began in 2011 and pays $3 billion over 12 years.
• Washington State Athletic Director Bill Moos said he hears an estimate of PAC-12 construction totaling $1 billion, and there is a joke that Commissioner Larry Scott should get an award from construction contractors for the work the contract has spawned.

Dive Insight:

The TV deal gives the conference all the rights over its games rather than splitting them with a TV network, as other conferences have done. The commissioner wanted that kind of deal because, outside of the University of Oregon, many schools needed revenue to fund programs that sometimes depended on university subsidies.