Pac-12: Welcome to the long goodbye

It’s not happening for two more years, he said. Besides, the travel won’t be that big a deal, he said. And the only thing worth worrying about is his own team, he said.

But then….

“Lincoln, Nebraska is 1,149 miles from our campus,” Chip Kelly (pictured, top) said. “Seattle is 1,135 miles from our campus.”

Someone asked the UCLA coach about the trek to Rutgers, in central New Jersey.

“It’s 2,765 miles,” he said. “Four and a half hour flight. Coming back will be a little longer.

“I haven’t looked at it very much.”

Pac-12 Football Media Day on Friday was physically conducted in Los Angeles on Friday,, but hearts and minds were dwelling on the Olentangy River and the Nittany Valley. A month ago UCLA and USC announced they were yanking the pillars from the Pac-12 and will take up with the Big 10, effective August 2024.

This sets up a long, rancorous goodbye. 

The two L.A. schools were the connective tissue of the conference. They were always the teams to beat, even lately, when they’ve been beaten often. It would be like removing Oahu from the Hawaiian Islands. Oregon has little in common with Arizona; Stanford isn’t exactly simpatico with Colorado.

George Kliavkoff, entering his second year as commissioner, said he’s confident that the Packing Ten will stay together. That’s a nice sentiment, but it is hard to imagine the Big 10 wouldn’t be interested in Oregon, Washington and Stanford.

Kliavkoff thought the toughest part of his job would be assembling the financial rubble that was left to him by ex-commissioner Larry “The Legend” Scott. Instead, his castle is being stormed by the Big Ten and the Big 12, and he finds himself denying that he’s interested in a merger with the Mountain West, which wouldn’t be prestigious but might improve the level of football.

Kliavkoff is having enough trouble insisting that the Packing 10 remain nice to the two infidels. He has absolutely no patience with the hungry eye of the Big 12, which just added BYU, Central Florida, Cincinnati and Houston for the 2023 season.

“I’ve been spending four weeks trying to defend against grenades that have been lobbed from every corner of the Big 12, trying to destabillize our remaining conference,” he said. “With respect to the Big 12 being open for business, I respect that. We haven’t decided if we’re going shopping there.”

Later, Kliavkoff flately told CBSSports.com that no Pac-12 school will join the Big 12.

USC, of course, is the Maybach of the conference, and it will go wherever it wants. UCLA is different. It has a University of California system partner in Cal, and Gov. Gavin Newsom dropped in on a Board of Regents meeting to demand that UCLA “clearly explain” how Big Ten membership will “improve the experience for all its student-athletes,” which, of course, it can’t.

UCLA officials will be grilled by the Regents in October. The party line from Westwood is that the Bruins enthusiastically joined the Big Ten because now they don’t have to cancel certain sports.

Kliavkoff hears different, dissonant notes from Westwood.

“I’d say UCLA is in a difficult situation,” he said. “Many people there are very, very unhappy with that decision — student-athletes, their families, the politicians, the fans, the alumni. There’s a lot of really, really upset people. There’s a hearing coming up about that decision. I can’t give you a percentage chance (that UCLA would renege) but if they came back, we’d welcome them back.”

Dan Lanning (pictured, bottom), the Oregon coach who coordinated Georgia’s national championship defense last year, wondered why this is such a big deal. After all it’s not like the Big 10 made off with the Pac-12’s best program.

“Oregon is a brand that can stand alone,” Lanning said. “It’s amazing how many kids tell me that Oregon has always been their dream school. Only nine teams have played for a national championship. Oregon has done it twice.”

He’s right, but it’s a little bigger than that. USC has been affiliated with the league, through its various changes of identity, for 98 years. UCLA has done so for 92 years. Even though neither school has made a College Football Playoff and USC has appeared in only three conference championship games, winning one, they are the answer to the word-association test when outsiders consider the Pac-12.

Stanford coach David Shaw said he didn’t know what would happen, but he’d want to continue playing the city schools no matter what happens. Kliavkoff said L.A., presumably SoFi Stadium, will play host to multiple neutral-site games.

Meanwhile, the rest of the league struggles for traction.

What does Colorado do – campaign for the Big Ten so it can rekindle its old, vicious rivalry with Nebraska, or try to get back to the Big 12, or hold tight?

Will Utah be swayed by the prospect of sharing the Big 12 with old foe Brigham Young, or will it be repulsed?

Can Arizona and Arizona State picture a Pac-12 without the nearby LA schools, or would they be lured by a partnership with Oklahoma State, TCU, Texas Tech and Baylor, the framework for a new Southwest Conference?

Jedd Fisch, Arizona’s ambitious second-year coach, said he’s telling L.A. parents that there’s no need to “fly to New York or Iowa or Ann Arbor” to see their sons, when they can drive “five-and-a-half hours” to Tucson. That’s a tough time standard unless you’re Lewis Hamilton,  but you get his drift. 

And can the Packing 10 swallow its elitism and admit that San Diego State and UNLV will bring a lot more to the conference besides market size and TV eyeballs?

But the pervasive gloom over L.A. wasn’t confined to logistical questions. It was a yearning for an ethos that, however unrealistic, made college athletics seem different.

Kliavkoff lamented the perversion of Name, Image and Likeness money into a slush fund used to recruiting, usually under the euphemism “collective.”

“It should not be used as an inducement or pay-for-play,” he said. “The NCAA has unfortunately decided not to enforce its rules.”

He envisioned “a draft system” where athletes would lose their choice of schools to attend, where they could be traded or fired the way the NFL’s are. “It’s hard to imagine that pro athletes would be required or even allowed to earn degrees,” he said.

He also feels the pain of athletic directors who might be watching their soccer or golf teams fly commercially, and expensively, to the heartland for mid-week competition, with no revenue coming back. Class attendance will be endangered. Kelly said that football won’t be affected because the trips don’t last long, and “we play only four road games and, every two years, one of them is USC.” 

Ideally, there’s a lot more to this than football.

Arizona State’s Herm Edwards coached the Jets and the Chiefs. “The new model is free agency,” he said. “I do know this: The player you have this season, you better re-recruit him because, if not, he might be playing somewhere else. That’s how it works. We can hold onto whatever we want to hold onto. That’s over with.”

Coaches always talk about controlling only what they can control, and leaving the unknown alone. The problem is that they’re accustomed to controlling so much. That’s why Kelly, and others, kept wanting to narrow the lens. UCLA, for example, is zoning in on the arduous task of playing Bowling Green on Sept. 3. Then they’ll worry about the looming challenges of South Alabama and Alabama State.

“Well, the Michigan game got dropped,” Kelly said. “This is ironic. It’s crazy how the world turns around, huh?”

Actually it’s about 1,100 miles from sane.