There will never be another Pac-12 football game again, at least in the form we know the conference as. Yet, after another fun and vastly underrated season, you still can’t help but think why anyone would want to blow this up over a few extra dollars. Look, I know I’m hopelessly hopeless when it comes to the topic of Pac-12 football. But its implosion is utterly stupid and that cannot be said enough.
Jonathan Smith has left Oregon State, a move by the way history tells us won’t end well, the Washington State Cougars coug’ed one last time in conference play and somewhere in a Manhattan penthouse former Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott is content with his terrible decisions while eating caviar off $100 bills.
Fans out west, by and large, don’t want this. Sure, you have a few loudmouths happy to leave their rivals in the dust. They will also be the same ones bitching about 9am PST kickoffs when their program plays back east in ten months’ time. So it goes.
I’ve visited as many Pac-12 stadiums as possible over the past two seasons knowing the end was nigh in some form. Of course, I didn’t foresee the complete demolition of the conference. It still feels surreal.
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On my travels, there was never a single bad experience. Sure, some games were more memorable than others. I’ll never forget seeing Oregon State win on a Hail Mary at Stanford. For entirely different reasons, I’ll also never forget watching this couple argue incessantly throughout the entire Washington/UCLA matchup at the Rose Bowl. If you’re going to fight in public for four hours, break up. That relationship ain’t lasting.
Not everything was great. The atmosphere at The Coliseum for USC games is boring. Being in Rice-Eccles Stadium to see Utah play is like visiting the bizarro world. Washington students are total dicks.
However, I will always cherish these memories, the long drives and brutal travel days. You haven’t lived life until you have visited West Wendover, Nevada on the way back from Salt Lake City, ate at Burgerville in Oregon or tried to cram in a stop at the Grand Canyon during a trip to see the Arizona schools play. That’s a huge mistake unless you’re also going to Las Vegas.
We are blowing it all up, though. All of the fun and all of the rivalries have been deemed unnecessary because they don’t bring in enough money. It’s a joke that is not funny. Sort of like what Fansville has become.
The only real difference between the Pac-12 and the other Power 5 conferences is time zones. People in the Eastern and Central time zones don’t really watch college football out west—at least not the average fan. The one College Gameday or Paul Finebaum panders to.
Those folks look at the box scores, maybe watch some highlights and assume that none of the programs are any good since no one is undefeated. This narrative has become particularly strong in the College Football Playoff era.
Now, I won’t sit here and say the Pac-12 hasn’t had down years over the past decade. For instance, 2021 was just a mediocre mess. Facts are facts and that is a fact. However, college football, unlike any other sport, is cyclical in nature.
As we’ve seen over the past decade alone, tides ebb and flow. Clemson and Oklahoma fell back to the pack after dominating the College Football Playoff in the late 2010s. Georgia has risen after being on the outskirts. Notre Dame comes and goes. In 2023, the Pac-12 is the best conference from top-to-bottom despite being brutal in 2021. Nothing is forever. Everything cycles in and out.
The one thing working in the Pac-12’s favor is that things have always been entertaining. Even the bad teams can put on a show from time to time. You’re not getting Iowa unable to complete a forward pass or the general incompetence of Texas A&M on a weekly basis over the past few seasons.
At the end of the day, what’s better: A fun, competitive and entertaining conference or one where everyone is basically playing out the string apart from maybe three or four matchups over the course of 14 weeks?
Sure, the Pac-12 didn’t get teams in the College Football Playoff most years. But it was a far better conference from a fan standpoint. Hell, just the fact that we didn’t have to listen to a bunch of pathetic Texas hype only for the Longhorns to fall flat on their face every year made it better than the Big 12.
In the end, that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered apart from money. Ah yes, money. A great conference is being disassembled for cash concerns. We’ve been continually told that schools need more money to stay competitive.
That argument doesn’t hold water in the slightest. Where does that extra money go? Hiring and firing coaches? An occasional facilities upgrade? More jerseys? Fat athletic director bonuses?
Yeah, none of those things are really needed to be competitive in college football. Sure, nice facilities can help and recruits like cool uniforms but plenty of teams have won without those things. Many more programs have lost with those items. Ultimately, more money rarely equals results.
How has all that extra SEC dough helped Florida or Texas A&M? Hell, Auburn just lost to New Mexico State and paid a ridiculous amount for the pleasure. Nebraska has gone from national powerhouse to national afterthought in the Big Ten. The ACC cannibalized the Big East. Now half the schools that pushed for that move want to leave.
Money is nice but it’s not everything in college football. Utah has surpassed both USC and UCLA despite their much deeper pockets. TCU and Baylor have been more relevant than Texas over the past decade. Money can help as long as you know what to do with it. There are far more schools that end up pissing cash down the drain.
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That is what sticks in my craw about the Pac-12 imploding. Instead of seeing UCLA and Cal play or Washington State face off against Oregon, we get Washington at Rutgers and USC versus Nebraska. And for what? So, the Trojans can fund that eventual Lincoln Riley buyout.
All things considered, two people deserve the majority of blame for all this. Larry Scott and George Kliavkoff. These two bumbling morons are the epitome of empty corporate suits. The fact this pair of losers will have profited from an entity they are responsible for killing is the biggest injustice of all.
Literally, anyone could have done a better job and more than likely saved the Pac-12, football and all. Instead, fans got these two bums who sat around firmly planted with dick in hand as the college football landscape passed them by.
We will never know what would have happened to the conference had a collection of pretentious school presidents colluded with Scott to pass on Texas and Oklahoma joining the Pac-12 in 2011. This was an absolutely ridiculous decision at the time and has aged about as well as milk left out in a car on a hot summer day.
The enduring moment of Kliavkoff’s reign, apart from him completely disappearing from public view, came during the week 0 opener between San Jose State and USC. He seemingly made Ted Robinson and Yogi Roth read a prepared statement claiming that the Pac-12 Network would focus on the games and ignore everything else that had happened.
This was tone deaf and did nothing but frustrate the conference’s loyal fans. And you would have to be loyal just to be watching the Pac-12 Network in the first place because, lord knows, neither Kliavkoff nor Scott did anything to make the channel a success. The long-winded statement read by the announcers was an insult to the fans who didn’t want this to happen, which is a majority of those on the West Coast.
That has been a key theme in all of this. West Coast college football fans don’t matter. That we exist as decoration for the college football landscape. That unless teams in your conference don’t support like 20 different fan websites, it doesn’t really matter.
If there is anything to be grateful for, I suppose it is the fact this split was quick. No long, drawn-out goodbyes. As someone who watched the WAC go through a much slower death in 2013, certainty can be solace. Oregon State and Washington State aren’t left to wither on the vine like Idaho and New Mexico State. No one is seeking out Chicago State here.
It’s still unnecessary. It still sucks. And it is still a terrible idea we will all probably come to regret down the road, even if the schools themselves refuse to admit it. Welcome to college football in the 2020s, the sport everyone knows is flawed but refuses to fix until they can make themselves rich.
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