The Pac-12 has undergone extraordinary change in the last two years, between losing 10 of its 12 members, gaining nine new member schools next year and inking at least two long-term media partnerships. Another media partner, this time a storied production hub, will give its football broadcast a whole new look and feel in 2025.
This season, the conference’s pregame, halftime and postgame studio shows will broadcast live from Goal Line Studios, the sound stage built by the late John Madden in Pleasanton, Calif. The 7,000-square foot facility is the largest full-service sound stage in Northern California.
The Hall of Fame football coach and color commentator, who passed away in December 2021, was afraid to fly, choosing to travel by his coach bus across the country. To keep his broadcasting and corporate endorsement obligations, Madden built a 3,000-square foot TV stage in the early 1990s that eventually became known as Goal Line.
In March 2023, Joe Madden, CEO of the studios and John’s eldest son, renovated Goal Line to maintain the “state of the art” ethos that father applied in building the facility decades earlier. The studio now features one of the largest LED volumetric video walls in the country—106 feet wide, 20 feet tall—that’s used for augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality productions.
“It’s kind of funny. [The renovation] was indirectly inspired by the last documentary film [Fox’s All Madden] that was shot with my dad,” Joe Madden said in a phone interview. “And they actually built kind of a version of a volume, a much smaller one that we have here. And I remember my dad was really blown away by it.”
After the 2024 realignment, the Pac-12 Network was shuttered. The broadcast facilities, which had been relocated to San Ramon, Calif., were reorganized into Pac-12 Enterprises to produce live sports for the remaining members (Oregon State and Washington State) and serve external clients, creating a new revenue stream in the process.
The shrunken Pac-12 signed a one-year broadcast deal with the CW just weeks before the start of football season. The network produced 11 of the 13 football games out of the San Ramon facilities, yet both the CW and Pac-12 Enterprises agreed that the studio setup wasn’t dynamic enough for what they envisioned for the future of their partnership.
With one look at the LED video wall, it didn’t take much to convince Michael Molinari, Pac-12 Enterprises’ SVP of business development and studio operations, that Goal Line was the place to go.
“My first thought was this is like about half a Sphere if you cut the top off,” he said in a phone interview, referring to the Las Vegas entertainment hub built by MSG chairman James Dolan. “The enormity of the space was something that stuck out.”
Goal Line will be the main studio for CW Football Saturday, which will include pregame, halftime and postgame shows for the Pac-12. (The CW will also use Goal Line for similar shows around its ACC games.) The San Ramon hub will remain the control room, and the delay in the feeds between the two facilities will be less than two-tenths of a second, at worst, according to Molinari. The feed then goes to the CW’s main national control in Atlanta, then out to TVs and streaming devices. Right now, the CW doesn’t have a permanent production hub for its live sports.
For 2025, the CW will broadcast nine of the 13 regular season football games while CBS and ESPN will split the remaining four. Both the CW and CBS recently agreed to separate five-year extensions with the Pac-12.
Financial details of the partnership between Pac-12 Enterprises (on behalf of the CW) and Goal Line were not disclosed, and no equity was exchanged by either party. However, both sides are open to collaborations beyond sports.
“E-sports just seems so obvious, and then corporate events as well,” Molinari said.
For Madden, bringing the Pac-12 into Goal Line was about more than having a new production client. “I welcomed it because with my dad’s passing, we haven’t had anything football going on in our studio except for Sunday football, which was a tradition with my dad when he retired.”
Having a live football presence again at Goal Line harkens back to those days where Madden and his brother Mike would listen to their father both analyze and wax poetic about a game to which he dedicated his life. “It was his Sunday football to the max,” Madden said, “so having this set up brings me back to my production days, with my dad. It’s fun to see where this might go.”
