Pac-12 walks off into the sunset

It ends with Arizona's ninth-inning rally, and it leaves behind an ocean of history. But we'll leave the light on.

Tommy Splaine brought his .237-hitting bat to the plate Saturday night, hoping to end this Pac-12 championship game with it, probably not realizing that he would be loading the final slingshot in conference history.

He got the base hit and Arizona had come all the way back from 3-0 to beat USC, 4-3. The usual dogpile followed in Scottsdale Stadium, witnessed by the exulting Arizona fans and the stiff-upper-lipped USC section.

Arizona was going to the NCAA tournament anyway. USC needed to win to get there. But that wasn’t the macro point. What Splaine did was bring down the curtain on the whole conference, from its AAWU days through the Pac-8, Pac-10, Pac-12 and, finally, the exodus. Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah will join the Big 12. USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon are becoming Big 10 members. Most nonsensically, Stanford and Cal will become part of the ACC family, as will SMU. Every other member of that league plays in the Eastern Time Zone. Those who still wear watches will be wearing out the stems, changing the hour. Splane did more than spark a celebration. His was the final chop to the tree of logic in college sports.

He also ended a night of reminders. We’re not blind to the money monster that fuels college sports, but we also haven’t lost our memories of why they drew us close in the first place. It’s all about surprise and romance. USC is almost never an underdog, but these Trojans were turned into refugees by Olympic construction at Dedeaux Field. They had to practice at a junior college as the sun rose, and their home games were a traffic snarl away, at either The Great Park at Irvine, or at UC Irvine, or at Loyola Marymount. They endured all that and still fought their way into the finals.

The Pac-12 went out roaring. UCLA won NCAA men’s volleyball. UCLA and Stanford are still alive in softball. USC’s men and women won beach volleyball.  Stanford won women’s golf, which had four Pac-12 teams in its final four.. UCLA’s women took water polo, just as UCLA’s men had in the fall.  Arizona State won men’s swimming. Stanford won men’s gymnastics.

Arizona and Oregon State will play host to NCAA baseball regionals this weekend. Arizona can win men’s golf. Washington became the second Pac-12 team to reach the finals of the College Football Playoff. Caleb Wiliams of USC was the top player taken in the NFL draft. Reggie Bush even got his Heisman Trophy back.

The next team to win an NCAA championship will be the Pac-12’s 562nd, which dwarfs every other conference. It’s an acknowledgement of how quickly the conference endorsed women’s sports. The rest of the country had to catch up to the Pac-12 in baseball, women’s basketball and women’s volleyball, but the coastal schools were still competitive. But the gradual retreat of the dynastic UCLA men’s basketball and USC football programs was difficult to overcome, even though Don James and Lute Olson would have been the best coaches in the history of several other conferences.

The individual genius of Pac-12 athletics far outshone team success. A nation of Pac-12-affiliated performers would have won 35 golds at the Tokyo Olympics and finished fifth overall. The Fosbury Flop was born at Oregon State, and Rafer Johnson, Henry Rono, Bob Seagren and Mike Powell are just the tip of the track and field iceberg.

Perhaps the only thing Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson truly share is their status as Pac-12 golfers. Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire rewrote home run history. Randy Johnson and Tom Seaver were Hall of Fame pitchers. Adley Rutschman and Spencer Torkelson were the most recent first-overall picks. 

The pool? Let’s start with Katie Ledecky, Janet Evans, Natalie Coughlin, Jenny Thompson, Matt Biondi and Tom Jager, and there’s a deep flotilla behind them.

John Elway, Troy Aikman, O.J. Simpson, Steve Emtman, Marcus Mariota, Andrew Luck, Junior Seau, Ronnie Lott, Marcus Allen….

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, Gary Payton, Don MacLean, Jason Kidd, Harold Miner, Ron Lee, Ed O’Bannon….

Cheryl Miller, Ann Meyers, Sabrina Ionescu, Lisa Leslie, Denise Curry, Jennifer Azzi….

Julie Foudy, Joy Fawcett, Brad Friedel, Cobi Jones, Paul Caligiuri…., 

Stevie Johnson, John McEnroe, Arthur Ashe, Jimmy Connors, Bob and Mike Bryan, Stan Smith, Dennis Ralston…

And no, we did not forget Jackie Robinson.

Beyond all that, the Pac-12 had distinctive venues. There were no other Husky Stadiums. You always knew when you were in Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium, or Autzen Stadium, or the L.A. Coliseum and Rose Bowl. Some people’s eardrums still ache from evenings in McKale Center, and MacArthur Court is not forgotten, no matter how many trees are painted on Oregon’s new floor. Folsom Field was radiant even before Neon got to Colorado.

The college towns were unmatched, at least if you’ve ever strolled past the Willamette while you stayed at the Valley River Inn in Eugene, where all the basketball teams encamped for four nights every winter. Or if you’d stayed on Mill Street in Tempe a bit too long before a noon kickoff the next day. Or if you’d done any number of available things in Seattle, L.A., San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Boulder or Tucson. Oh, there’s games, too. Better set an alarm for those.

And, like most conferences, there was commonality. All the schools were flooded with California kids. If Stanford came to play USC, someone was going to mention the day Tavita Pritchard and Jim Harbaugh pulled the biggest upset in football history. If Arizona came to Oregon for hoops, someone was going to remember what Terrell Brandon did once upon a time, or Sean Elliott. Context and history are really the only non-revenue reasons to athletic conferences to exist, except maybe for the $17 million that ACC commissioner Jim Phillips made last year for doing who-knows-what. Those traditions and rivalries, the things that make college athletics so different from Team X playing Team Y for Trophy Z, are being dissipated faster than Arctic ice.

The destructive role of ex-commissioner Larry Scott has been underrated. By depressing Pac-12 revenues while moving into shiny San Francisco offices and buying mansions for himself in the East Bay, Scott created the yearning, by USC and UCLA, to make some real money. When they left the Pac-12, the game was up. Schools were hopping onto the window sills of new conferences like they were the last helicopters out of Saigon. As the Big Ten and SEC became the cities on the hill, thanks to their own network money, the Pac-12 faded away, playing football games that didn’t end until 3 a.m. in the East. Now Oregon State and Washington State have been forced to join forces with Mountain West football schools and West Coast Conference basketball schools just to find places to play.

Meanwhile, the other West Coast schools will have their teams flying through the night to get back to school from Bloomington and Tallahassee and Morgantown. The baseball and softball teams will be shivering on diamonds in West Lafayette and Chestnut Hill and Cincinnati. Fortunately, all those athletes will be paid, to varying degrees, thanks to the NCAA’s settlement of several player-driven suits that they were on the verge of losing. But that opens up a cascade of new questions and dilemmas that, inevitably, will lead to one upper-tier ecosystem, at least in football.

When that happens, and when the TV money is distributed evenly to the power-conference teams, maybe the skeleton of the old Pac-12 will be exhumed. There are sketchy ideas to divide those teams into geographic divisions, for scheduling purposes. The old stadiums will be waiting, drained and thirsty after years of dull, extraneous visits by Purdue and Syracuse and Central Florida. Maybe the Pac-12 will rise from those ashes, new and different but somehow quaint. By the time that happens, maybe those trophies will know how to talk.