The Pac-12 in crisis

The once proud league is completely falling apart without the ballasts of USC and UCLA. What's next for their member schools?

Most people don’t really care much about Pac-12 football.

It’s the dirty secret of college football, hidden whenever possible by the West Coast media where some of the biggest names in the College Football commentariat reside. Back in my SB Nation days we eventually started ignoring the Pac-12, because articles about Pac-12 teams didn’t generate numbers. Sure, if USC were to put together a good season that was news, but as a general rule most college football fans couldn’t tell you who won the last league championship.

It was a relief to me not to have to observe them closely for several reasons. Among them,

• It’s hard as an Eastern time zone person to stay up on Saturday nights for Pac-12 games.

• Their incredibly foolish conference administration bitterly fought Pac-12 game replays being available on YouTube. (God forbid people try to watch our games later, that would only increase interest in our product!)

• They weren’t going to be relevant in the playoffs anyways.

It’s a major problem for the league, always has been, although less of a problem than losing USC to the Big 10.

Can anyone remember back to 2020 when there was a question over whether college football would take place? Anyone remember what happened in the Pac-12?

They resisted having a season, then realized along with the Big 10 it was going to happen without them, so they put in place absurd COVID precautions above and beyond what anyone else required and managed to play a sort of abridged season. No one really cared.

I remember scouting Colorado, who managed to go 4-1, in my Inside Texas preview for the Alamo Bowl. I quickly observed it was a terrible team, a total paper tiger, who’d offer no serious opposition to a Longhorn victory. Sure enough…

But all the operational losses athletic departments took during COVID is sparking faster realignment changes as the lure of big TV money is too good to pass up. Now the league is basically in existential crisis. Without USC (and UCLA, to a lesser extent) they can’t really command much in the form of TV media rights. What they do get is likely to be contested by Oregon and Washington as being deservedly theirs moreso than Oregon State’s or Cal’s. Inequality in a conference is tough, the Big 12 can tell you all about it…