If you were to honestly go back and do this objectively, you'd find he actually wasn't really wrong about many things -- mostly because he simply reported what he was being told, not just saying what he thought would happen. (Also worth noting that he recently said his sources were at least half of the remaining presidents, not just OSU and WSU.)Can someone please aggregate all of John Canzano's takes about conference realignment from the last 18 months?
But, if you look at the overall themes of what he reported, they were:
1. The remaining presidents were united.
2. The remaining presidents were waiting to see a deal.
3. The remaining presidents wanted the Pac to survive.
4. The deal was taking longer because of the involvement of streaming partners.
The first three points turned out to be true. For the past year, while rumors consistently broke that the four-corner schools were just days or weeks away from defecting (even as those ADs/presidents took to twitter to say otherwise), JC didn't run with those rumors.
What happened was Colorado got antsy and bolted to the Big-12, which forced the commissioner to reveal his best-possible deal, and it clealry wasn't what he'd been promising to the remaining presidents.
Then, the damn broke, and here we are.
It also turns out that some of the Big-12 mouthpieces were also right about some things. Like Colorado. Yes, Colorado clearly wanted to stay in the Pac, but it was also preparing a landing spot in the Big-12. Yes, Oregon had been vetted by the B1G, but Canzano/Wilner/others were also correct that 1) no invite was on the table and 2) the B1G wasn't interested in further expansion. That only changed over the past week after the damn broke.
The wild, rapidly shifting landscape over the past two weeks doesn't apply to the previous 14 months. The conference would have died immediatley after USC/UCLA left if that were true.
