there's a school the Pack 12 could add with over 60,000 students that has top rated academics that had a fourth round draft pick this year and despite being close to Washington State and Oregon State it has its own top media market and more importantly this school provides a unique opportunity that could save the Pack 12 from merging with the Mountain West this school is the University of British Columbia now hear me out this is no traditional pick but the Pack 12 doesn't have the luxury of playing it safe if the want to compete against the power conferences but this Choice has a little more upside than You' expect for instance British Columbia is the only Providence in Canada where they play high school American four down football and the NFL is wildly popular in British Columbia and Canada as a whole according to a study by the Angus Reed Institute in 2021 23% of British Colombians and 19% of Canadians said that they followed the NFL closely or very closely if we assume that these numbers still hold that would give us an audience about 1.2 million in British Columbia an audience of 7.6 million in Canada as a whole while we can't expect all these people to tune in to watch UBC this gives us a realistic Market size to work with and this shows long-term growth potential that is much bigger than any of the other options that the Pack 12 has you see with these Canadian content laws 50% of what Canadians see on TV or listen to in the radio must come from Canada and the Canadian indan government just passed a law that will soon require the same for online streamers the University of British Columbia also has two key advantages that would help them get up to speed a lot faster than another program first being Canadian content laws also known as can con and American visa laws now there's a lot that we can say about these laws but what it means for sports is that even though something like the NFL might be wildly popular in Canada the cost to show a game isn't just whatever the network paid for it it's that plus the 3 hours they will now need to fill with Canadian content this gives the University of British Columbia some additional value as it lets broadcasters show these games and not only does it not cost them extra time that they have to spend with some Canadian content but it would actually go towards giving the network more time to show more profitable non-canadian shows now it's the second Advantage those visa laws that could really help them be competitive in recruiting and nil according to sport nearly 12% of division one athletes but despite that student visas stipulate that foreign students can only make money in some few specific ways nil is not one of those some of the biggest schools have the resources to find ways around this though such as Purdue playing basketball in Canada in order to play Zack Eddie but not every school can do this and even among the schools that do do this they don't pay the Canadian players as much because of how difficult it is to do if University of British Columbia uses this effectively they could be very competitive to get Canadian players of which there are some surprising amount of power conference players such as and I apologize if I pronounce these names wrong Curtis Roi or Christian velic you know two quarterbacks for Indiana and Pittsburgh respectively if they're able to grab some of these good Canadian players they would very likely be a great team that might not be fighting for championships but could get into some pretty decent blls okay now you're probably thinking this sounds all nice and good you know British Columbia seems to have a lot of good long-term potential but how is this going to save the Pack 12 check this out in order to stay a conference the NCAA requires that a conference has at least eight teams now for Oregon State and Washington State it's much better for them if they have as few teams as possible since they are worth so much more than the teams they could reasonably add this means if they hit exactly eight they'll only get duded to being one4 of the conference compared to if they join full Mountain West 17th now the safest solution would be to just add the top six Bound West teams however according to pack 12 insiders and journalists there's only enough cash to get four teams but by adding UBC they would greatly expand the options they have to get to that eight team either by adding a different team not in the Mountain West or by fundraising the much lower price of only one additional team and as to why the University of British Columbia instead of any other school well it's just like I was telling you University Bri Columbia is closer more prestigious and has far more upside than any other options that they have now of course there are some logistical issues that come with this idea for one the University of British Columbia would have to play off campus for a while since their current on campus stadium is really small but there are real IC options if they were to play such as the Providence owned Stadium BC Place which is only couple miles away another issue is the logistics of international travel but University of British Columbia is already an associate member of the NAIA and already plays a lot of different sports in America therefore I don't think this would be as big of an issue as it would appear however the biggest issue that would be getting the NCAA to agree you see back in 2008 the University of British Columbia actually tried to join division one and the NCAA actually changed their constitution to allow each division to be able to vote on allowing Canadian teams to enter but only division 2 voted to do so it's hard to say what it would take to get the rest of division one on board certainly them having a conference offer would go a long way but I think the best bet would be to focus on the amount of money that they would be able to bring to March Madness remember division one includes all teams that play play basketball in division one this is important because a lot of nonf football schools survive off of the money they get from March Madness if bringing in a Canadian school would help the tournament bring in more money then it should be a lot easier to get a lot of these nonf football teams on board but it's hard to say if this would be enough now I'm not going to pretend that I have all the numbers most of them aren't publicly available or that adding UBC would be a easy risk-free investment if they were the pack wouldn't be able to get them it would probably take a long time for British Columbia to reach its potential too but with all the details laid out it seems financially negligent for the conference to not even consider the opportunity with all that said thanks so much for watching do you think the University of British Columbia could work in division one who do you think the Pack 12 should have do you think that Oregon State and Washington State have any hope in getting to only eight teams or do you think that they should just give up and just join the Mountain West