over who got to keep it. From the second they found out, that money was earmarked to mitigate the damage to their AD budgets (remember, they went from the stability of the PAC-12's media rights payouts of ~$33m a year to basically nothing, overnight, and also lost their scheduled conference games for football and every other sport) and, if necessary, paying for exit fees to rebuild the conference. OSU and WSU were clearly hoping for a life raft to the Big 12 or the ACC, and that the latter wouldn't be necessary. That wasn't the way things worked out. They both became aware that a life raft wasn't coming, at least not in the time frame necessary to avoid devastating financial disaster for their ADs, so they've now joined the "game of thrones" that is conference realignment - the continued viability of the ACC, especially a post-exodus G5 ACC, is now a direct threat to what they're trying to build, so they're being aggressive and taking the ACC's potential future moves off the board. In other words, the idea is now, if/when an ACC exodus and scramble to back fill spots happens, the PAC-12 wants to ensure that all the best G5 expansion candidates are already off the board and locked into the PAC-12.