Scheduling Partnership Linking Pac-12 and Big 10 Falls Apart A scheduling agreement between the Pac-12 and the Big Ten, which sparkled with promise and possibility when announced in December, has fizzled. The leagues announced jointly Friday that the proposed agreement for each of their members to play a football game against a team from the other conference starting in 2017 has fallen apart. The fundamental fissure between the leagues was the Big Ten's preference for 12 games with the Pac-12 every year. Larry Scott, the Pac-12"s commissioner, said in a telephone interview that it ultimately became a "flexibility" issue for his conference, whose teams play a nine-game conference schedule and which also has complications like the long-standing scheduling agreements Southern California and Stanford have with Notre Dame. The Big Ten teams play an eight-game league schedule, making the addition of an annual marquee out-of-league game easier. "We were hoping to capture lightning in a bottle, and that it was a win-win for everyone," Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany said. They were struggling with it, mostly their nine-game schedule and Notre Dame ties. Scott said he explored the possibility of switching to an eight-game conference schedule, but the Pac-12 member schools and television partners did not want to accommodate the Big Ten scheduling plan. He said there was little interest in that because the Pac-12 teams wanted to play one another as much as possible. "The Big Ten wanted 12 games a year," Scott said. It wasn't in our interest at this stage. It doesn't mean we won't figure something else out down the road.