Pac-12's demise isn't worth mourning

It's just another byproduct of college football's money grab, and it was self-inflicted anyway.

Cameron Ward, Washington State QB

On Friday, the sports world was shattered by the news that certain college athletic programs will no longer be in the same confederation.

This is unfortunate and disheartening for some, like the coaches and players at Oregon State and Washington State. 

It is not the fall of the Roman Empire. It’s more important than Doris Burke replacing Mark Jackson, or Twitter rebranding itself as “X,” but not much.

The death of the Pac-12, or at least its reduction to the Pac-4, is clearly linked to bad decisions, including the league’s decision to hire a bad decision-maker in ex-commissioner Larry Scott. 

But it was fated from the moment USC and UCLA decided to flee for the Big Ten last July. Ever since, the remaining schools have been frozen by the promise of a new media-rights deal. When it came in too late and several million dollars short, Colorado returned to the Big 12, Arizona, Arizona State and Utah followed, and Oregon and Washington agreed to become the 15th and 16th teams in the Big Ten, which means the travel demands on USC and UCLA athletes won’t be nearly as arduous as feared.

Boiling oceans and the resolution of student debt are much more consequential, just to name two.

Or, as Colorado coach Deion Sanders refreshingly said, “I don’t care what conference we’re in or who we’re playing against, we’re trying to win.

“All this is about money. You know that. It’s about a bag. Everybody’s chasing the bag. Then you get mad at the players when they chase it. How’s that? How do the grownups get mad at the players when they chase it when the colleges are chasing it?”

The death of the Pac-12 won’t be nearly as traumatic as the death of the Southwest Conference, which had nine teams, eight of them in Texas. Its culture was embedded deeply in every corner of the state. Brothers and couples went to rival schools. There was identity and history, and rivalries within rivalries, like TCU-SMU and Texas-Texas A&M. The SWC died because of an epic run of football scandals, and its schools scattered like the wind. Next year Texas and Oklahoma will abandon the Big 12 and head for the SEC, and Texas will play A&M again.

The Pac-12 made sense when it was the Pac-10. Conferences should adhere to the following rules: Every team should play every other one, and the schools should be no more than one time zone apart. Before Colorado and Utah were buzzed in, Pac-10 basketball schools had a travel-partner system that was quite comfortable and player-friendly. Visitors would play at Arizona on Thursday and Arizona State on Saturday, and the same with the L.A., Bay Area, Washington and Oregon schools. After expansion, that went out the window, and there were seasons in which UCLA and Arizona, which once had a spectacular rivalry, only played each other once.

It was more difficult to relate to the new schools. Colorado, for instance, brought only six men’s sports, the Division I minimum. It became the only Pac-12 school with no baseball. But mostly there was unfamiliarity.

It certainly didn’t help competition. In nine years of the College Football Playoff, the Pac-12 has participated only twice. No Pac-12 basketball team has won the men’s NCAA title since Arizona in 1997.

But there was a time when the networks were interested in what Bill Walton calls, with no satirical intent, the Conference of Champions. The Pac-12 still had big markets and towering, if fading, history. Scott took over the Pac-12 after running the Women’s Tennis Association tour. He was fluent in corporate-speak and grandiose in his tastes. He moved the Pac-12 headquarters from Walnut Creek to downtown San Francisco and committed the league to $696,000 a month in rent. He made $4.1 million for himself in the first six months of 2021 before he was fired.

For what? Scott got the Pac-12 network started. To say he got it off the ground would be a stretch. Because he refused to sign a distribution agreement with a broadcast partner like ESPN or Fox, and instead foresaw a time when the Pac-12 network would be profitable through an affiliation with Direct TV and nothing else, his conference began to get lapped.

In fiscal year 2022, the Pac-12 paid its member schools $37 million each, thanks to a good performance in the NCAA tournament and a nice turnout at its football championship game in Las Vegas. That was still nearly $13 million less, per school, than the SEC paid its schools, and at least $5 million less than Big 12 schools got, and the Big 12 has no in-house network.

After USC and UCLA bolted, there was still the skeleton of a very appealing conference, particularly if the Pac-12 could get replacements such as Houston, TCU or SMU. But as the months passed without the announcement of a new TV deal, the Big 12 brazenly filled the vacuum and negotiated a new deal with ESPN and Fox that will give its schools $31.7 apiece.

When the Pac-10 could only whimper that it had the framework of an Apple TV streaming deal that would pay the schools $20 million on the promise that more would come, there was little incentive for anyone to stay.

Oregon State and Washington State got the royal shaft, and there was nothing either could do to avoid it. Their best option is to hope that the Mountain West will adopt them. Certainly for WSU, the Mountain West makes the most geographic and cultural sense, but both athletic programs will have to live with far less money.

Stanford and Cal are also marooned at the moment. But Stanford, even as an independent, would likely dominate the NCAA”s non-revenue sports and win the Director’s Cup as it does now. It’s still Stanford. Cal is still Cal. Nothing that happened last week will stop the flow of Nobel prizes. But neither football program is thriving at the box office, and this will not help. Cal averaged 38,000 fans last year, Stanford 29,000.

Utah governor Spencer Cox was happy with the developments because the Holy War is back. Utah and BYU will be throwing daggers at each other again in Big 12 play. But Cox also saw the big picture.

“I’m more concerned and disturbed than ever at the decaying landscape of college athletes, where a small group of media executives can destroy generations of history and tradition,” he said.

Where does it end? It ends where it stays right now. The SEC and the  Big Ten schools will have the gold and they will set the rules. It was instructive that Alabama coach Nick Saban bought a six-bedroom cottage in Jupiter, Fla. during all this. Price tag: $17.5 million. Perhaps he should finance the Pac-12.

There’s no use asking what this has to do with universities in general and the future of education. When professors are getting hardballed and when class sizes are skyrocketing and when campus housing is an emergency on many campuses, particularly in cities, we also live in a society in which football players are given the finest nutrition and the most extensive tutoring system available.

You can have a great university without playing big-time sports. The University of Chicago produced the first Heisman winner in Jay Berwanger, but now plays Division III and continues to blaze academic trails.

Canada has a different value system. The University of Toronto is generally the top-ranked school in the country. International students pay $33,000 (USD) in tuition. That compares to $61,000 at USC. For Canadians, the tuition is $3,300 (USD).

That gap is not attributable to the lack of Big Football. But it is an indication that Canadian and European colleges have a sharply defined goal for their students: Educate them.

A Canadian college is one of the last places you can find a promising hockey player. Only three Canadian alumni were on NHL rosters this year, including Vegas goalie Logan Thompson. Those who show aptitude for hockey either go to a U.S. college or play in one of three junior leagues. They live with families in the town wherever they play, and they go through a close approximation of an NHL schedule. They are not holding a spot in a college that could go to someone who wants to run a business or learn marketing skills or just has an urge to break down John Milton.

College football in America is no more absurd than it was two weeks ago. It won’t ever make sense until its best teams are sponsored by corporations, train permanently at their own camps somewhere far from campus, and then parachute into Tuscaloosa or Ann Arbor or Clemson on Saturday to, yes, wear the school’s name, image and likeness. Most of the fans won’t know the difference or care one bit. And if there are 45 new players transferring next year, so be it, as long as they can play. It makes it easier when you don’t have to know their names.

Forget the scholarships, the classrooms, the friendships, anything else that isn’t transactional. College sports in general and college football in particular is all about Chasing The Bag. In fact that should be the new College Football Playoff trophy, a big satchel with a green dollar mark on the side.

They were Chasing The Bag long before Friday. The only difference is that some of them have taken what’s inside, and some of the others are holding it.