Pac-12’s demise is a sad day in collegiate athletics
Friday was a sad day for college football.
Friday likely was a potential victorious day for the Big 12, with apparently Arizona and perhaps Arizona State and Utah coming to the conference.
Friday was a fascinating day for the Big Ten, with Washington and Oregon receiving invitations to join the league of Rutgers and Maryland.
Friday was a disastrous day for the Pac-12, Bill Walton’s conference of champions, with the loss of its last two remaining cornerstones and perhaps more.
The latter brings the sadness.
If the bell tolls for the Pac-12, or even the Pac-12 as we once knew it, college athletics are worse, not better.
Losing a regal conference is not good for anybody. It perhaps helps the Big Ten with a little more geographic balance, what with Southern Cal and UCLA already set to join the league. It absolutely helps the Big 12 with stability; a league twice on life support is breathing on its own.
But a dead Pac-12, or a zombie Pac-12, with half-Mountain West schools, makes college football a lesser product.
A grand sport with a wild mix of schools and traditions and styles and kickoff times, has become more - homogenized. More corporate. More corporate never is a good thing. College football tradition is matched by what other sport? Baseball maybe. Certainly not the National Football League. Not the NBA. Not college basketball. Not even golf, which at times can be stuck in 1963.
Grand old rivalries. Kooky trophies. Iconic uniforms. Wild formations and schemes.
All are part of college football’s fabric, yet some have been whittled and others are in danger, as conference realignment changes the landscape. Death of a conference usually is sad. But when Big East football died, we at least knew Big East basketball would live on, no doubt thrive, and it wasn’t like Big East football dominated our pasts or our presents.
And when the Southwest Conference died, we knew it was a one-state league, which made sense in its day and was quaint by modern standards, but really didn’t work as the 21st century loomed.
But the Pac-12? The conference of John Wooden and Marcus Allen, the conference of Mel Renfro and Sonny Sixkiller, the conference of John Elway and Jim Plunkett?
How could a league with so much history and so much tradition and so much style, a league that was the NCAA’s front porch for literally two American time zones, go out of business or be a virtual museum relic?
Well, we know the answer. Inexplicably terrible leadership. Corporate greed from infidels. A changing marketplace.
Academic arrogance. Plenty of blame to go around.
Who killed the Pac-12 as we know it? Round up the usual suspects. Former Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott. USC, with its decision to bolt for the Big Ten. Current Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff. The Southeastern Conference, for lighting the latest realignment surge by swiping OU and Texas from the Big 12. The Big Ten, for feigning an alliance with the Pac-12, then stabbling the Pac in the back. Brutus and Judas had nothing on former Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren.
Doesn’t much matter now.
The Pac-12 figures to die a quick death, or reinvent itself as a half-power league. Stanford and Cal-Berkeley have wanted nothing to do with Boise State for lo these many years; now the likes of Boise State are all that could keep a Pac-12 0.0 alive.
And various Western ports will be a little (or a lot) less interested in college football.
The metrics say that doesn’t matter to the bottom line. Oregon State and Washington State don’t produce huge numbers in the marketplace. The Bay Area is not a college sports hotbed.
And in recent years, the Pac-12 became less relevant at the highest levels of competition. No College Football Playoff team since 2016. No NCAA basketball title since 1997.
But the Pac-12 has been distinct. Provincial.
The league was different, in ways beyond television money. It’s like Walton said when his Bruins declared for the Big Ten: “I don’t want to join the Big Ten, I want to beat the Big Ten.”
Conference superiority, conference pride, once was a rallying point for fans.
A week or two after OU and Texas declared for the SEC in 2021, I stopped off in Mississippi en route to the Alabama gulf coast. I ran into an OU fan, and he was bummed by the SEC news.
He said he will miss the arguments and the debates over conferences. Standing in SEC country, on vacation from Edmond, he seemed to want to beat the SEC, not join the SEC.
Rivalries between conferences has invigorated fans. SEC vs. ACC. Big Ten vs. Pac-12. Big 12 vs. SEC. ACC vs. Big Ten. Big 12 vs. Pac-12.
But soon there could be just four major conferences, with clear delination in that small club. SEC and Big Ten on one side, Big 12 and ACC on the other.
The Pac-12’s troubles have propped up the Big 12, and that’s good news in Ames and Manhattan, Lubbock and Stillwater.
But it’s not good news for the health of the sport, which built its popularity on tradition but now is turning its back to the same.