How Greed and Mismanagement Killed the Pac-12 College Sports League
It was the Conference of Champions with over 500 national titles - more than twice as many as any other league. Today, it's all but dead.
1959 University of Washington football team. Photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives
It called itself, not immodestly, The Conference of the Champions but it was true. Over its 108 years of existence, Pac-12 sports teams racked up 544 national titles in everything from basketball (16 national championships) to track and field (47) to water polo (50). But its biggest sport - its brand and identity - was always football.
It’s over now. Well, football anyway. The other sports will wrap up league play over the next half year. The final Pac-12 football game was played last Friday. Oregon, ranked No. 8 in the nation, and Washington, ranked No. 2, met in the league championship game with the winner assured a slot in the championship round. The Washington Huskies won in a thriller. Pac-12 football ended with a bang, not a whimper.
Next year, 10 of its 12 colleges will be playing in new leagues far, far away. The Pac-12, if it even exists, will be the Pac-2, Oregon State and Washington State. Orphans. You can blame the usual suspects. Arrogance. Mismanagement. Mistakes. And, of course, greed.
"Even if you have no ties to a traditional Pac-12 school, you might have some sort of allegiance to the institution of college sports," wrote Ryan McGee of ESPN. "And even if your blood runneth a Crimson Tide or a Carolina Blue or any other hue that resides well east of the Rockies, the idea of the Pac-12 being vaporized should feel at the very least unsettling and at the very most, sad. Super, super sad."
San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist Scott Ostler wrote, "As a kid, I always felt kind of sorry for other athletics conferences. I was biased, a West Coast lad, but the Pac-8 and its ever larger versions seemed more exciting, more colorful, more dynamic than other conferences."
UCLA-USC game, 2012, credit: Neon Tommy
Once upon a time, I believed in the fairy tale of college football. I grew up in Los Angeles, not far from USC. My family were Trojans fans almost from the day we arrived from Oakland in the 1960s. I lived and died with the fate of Southern Cal, triumphant with every win, crestfallen with each loss. In 1974, when SC stormed back from a 24-6 halftime deficit to crush Notre Dame 55-24, it was one of the happiest days of my life. When Texas scored the winning touchdown in the waning seconds of the 2006 Rose Bowl, I was plunged into despair.
Over the years, I saw a cardinal and gold parade of some of the greatest college athletes ever to play the game. Garrett. Bell. Simpson. A.D. Charlie White. Swann. Bush. Leinart. Palmer. I was thrilled to see the white horse galloping around the perimeter of the Coliseum after an SC touchdown. I was intoxicated by the marching band playing Fight On! and my favorite, the Fanfare. The cheerleaders were practically goddesses. It was magical stuff.
College football has been part of the fabric of American culture for more than a century. There were the fabled rivalries. SC-UCLA. SC-Notre Dame. Ohio-State-Michigan. Stanford-Cal. Texas-Oklahoma. Florida-Florida State. Michigan-Michigan State. Army-Navy. Harvard-Yale. As a kid, I was moved to tears by the biopic, The Knute Rockne Story, and the famous "Win one for the Gipper" scene. From an earlier era, players like Tom Harmon of Michigan (to a younger generation, he's the father of Mark Harmon), and Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis, the back-to-back Heisman trophy winners at Army, and the iconic Alabama coach, Paul "Bear" Bryant, were celebrities.
In those days, the colleges were not in it for money -- or so I thought -- but for the purity and nobility of competition. Players got no compensation, which I thought then was how it should be. There wasn't even a national football championship game.
I now realize that I was I was naive, or maybe something changed. As the saying goes, I'm sadder but wiser now.
UCLA coach John Wooden’s teams won 10 NCAA championships. That’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - then know as Lew Alcindor - standing next to him. Photo credit: Los Angeles Times
The Pac-12 started in 1915 as the Pacific Coast Conference and later evolved into the Pac-8, then Pac-10, then Pac-12. Along the way, it became a sports powerhouse. Pac-12 schools have produced 1,500 Olympic athletes. UCLA won 11 national basketball championships - at one point, an astonishing seven years in a row (1967-73). And the league was in the vanguard of social progress. Jackie Robinson played football at UCLA at a time when few major football colleges had Black players. Warren Moon at Washington was the first Black star quarterback at Washington in the 1970s. Jim Plunkett at Stanford and Joe Kapp at Cal were among the first Latinos to play quarterback. Stanford was one of the first colleges to ban a racist nickname (The Indians became The Cardinal).
A decade ago, the Pac-12 was thriving. Today, it's in ruins, victim of a series of missteps and mismanagement. The errors and misjudgments they made in their television deals are too arcane to go into here. Suffice to say, it went badly leaving the L.A. schools - USC and UCLA - with a powerful incentive to leave the conference next year. There was more money to be made elsewhere.
In the summer of 2022 came the shocking announcement that USC and UCLA were leaving to join the Big Ten. The Los Angeles Times reported that some projections put each school's annual media rights earnings at $65 million to $75 million, more than double what they now get in the Pac-12. Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate source told them to "follow the money." SC and UCLA did just that.
Looking back, once that happened the dissolution of the Pac 12 was probably assured. Without the two colleges in the largest media market, the league could not get a lucrative TV deal, meaning less money for the remaining schools. This past summer, in rapid succession, other Pac-12 colleges pulled out. Colorado joined the Big 12. Oregon and Washington defected to the Big Ten, which, in turn, led Arizona, Arizona State and Utah to jump to the Big 12. In August, Cal and Stanford bolted to the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Officially, the Pac-12 still exists with just two teams, Oregon State and Washington State. Today, those two announced that each would play six games next season against Mountain West Conference teams, paving the way for them to join the MWC.
"It's incomprehensible for those who appreciate the long and glorious history of the league," wrote Jerry Brewer in the Washington Post. "College football resembles a mafia movie now. It's not personal; it's strictly business."
Stanford's great women's basketball coach, Tara VanDerveer, said simply, "Isn't this just all about greed?"
The Cal-Stanford game was known locally as simply The Big Game. Photo credit: Peter Alfred Hess
Last week, the Stanford Cardinal played Florida State for the women's college soccer championship (they lost). The University of Arizona is the No. 1 ranked men's basketball team. Stanford, UCLA and USC are all among the top women's teams. Washington's football team is No. 2 in the nation and headed to the college playoffs.
Traveling back and forth across the country to play games will be onerous. I used to feel sorry for the University of Hawaii having to fly 5 hours to play an away game. That’s now the fate of the six West Coast teams that left the Pac 12.
All the additional air travel to play distant opponents also seems to undercut the colleges’ stated commitments and efforts to reduce carbon emissions. USC, for instance, set a 2035 goal to become “climate neutral,” including cutting emissions from air travel. A one-way coast-to-coast flight produces about 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide.
The new order could also threaten the existence of the so-called minor sports teams. All that travel costs a lot of money, Money matters. A few years ago, Stanford announced it was cutting 11 sports to save money. They were restored after an uproar. But it's easy to imagine Pac-12 schools shutting down, say, men's wrestling or women's volleyball.
Stanford women’s basketball teams have won 3 NCAA titles. Photo credit: Glennia
"I'm not even sure where to begin," wrote San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist Ann Killion. "Do you most hate the warped college sports culture that values football above all else, even though the Pac-12 was so much better at so many other sports? Do you despise a society that will sacrifice women's sports and Olympic sports on the altar of the gridiron?"
Over its long history, the Pac-12 forged some of the great rivalries in college sports. Some of the rivalries will continue even after the realignment. Some won't. It was fun while it lasted.
For me the NIL money and the transfer portal were nails driven into the college sports coffin even before the conference realignments. I'm old enough to remember when professional sports teams' rosters were nearly as stable as the Rock of Gibraltar before free agency. Admittedly, that needed to change but now that college sports has "student" athletes able to make more money than any of their professors, things have turned into a tragic comedy. From one year to the next I have no idea who might be playing for the Dodgers or the Clippers but now it has become the same with the Bruins and the Trojans.
Timely piece after having enjoyed the Oregon Washington game. And your mention of the USC Trojan marching band and cheerleaders brought back memories of seeing them play Northwestern long ago, a game I attended in Evanston Illinois. I was enthralled by both the band and cheerleaders more than the game lol. They had that West Coast vibe that overshadowed the more bland Big Ten stuff. Thanks for the great read Ron!