I understand there is no going back and further expansion is inevitable, but it saddens me to see the PAC 10/12 go away as we knew it. Was a great, fun conference and I always enjoyed the late afternoon/night after Gophers were over.
Totally agree with this, man. That was a foundational conference going all the way back to 1915, with so much history and tradition, and to see it so rapidly end like this, it is shocking, it's disappointing, and it is very, very sad.
I was reading an article by Stewart Mandel this morning talking about how it was just 12 years ago this coming November when ESPN Gameday was broadcasting from Palo Alto as the #3, undefeated Cardinal hosted #6 Oregon, with that 2011 season ending with three of the top six teams in America being members of the Pac-10. And it was just a year earlier, in 2010, with both Nebraska and Missouri having privately expressed interest in the Big 10, that it looked for all the world (and came so very, very, very close to actually happening) as if the PAC-10 was going to become the PAC-16, with Texas, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Colorado all being extended invites, and it was only at the last minute that Texas AD Deloss Dodds changed his mind and the whole endeavor collapsed. That would have been the end of the Big-12 and the beginning of the first true super-conference (and an absolute beast it would have been), but such was not to be and here we are 13 years later with the PAC-12 having ended while the Big-12 carries on. It's crazy...
The league was simply a victim of just epic mismanagement over the past 15 years, with its fatal flaw being its inability (and frankly, unwillingness) to find a distribution partner to carry its PAC 12 network, with its bizarre configuration of seven channels. That left the league just incredibly vulnerable to the vagaries of the broadcast market, and here we are with the result. It is sad.
The true victims here are Washington State and Oregon State (Stanford and Cal will ultimately be fine, and have both been approached by the ACC about possible membership), as they are the red-headed stepchildren without a home and with very few options, none of them good. For now at least, their Apple Cup and Civil War rivalry games with Washington and Oregon respectively will continue, but beyond that, things look incredibly bleak. They may have no hope but to find a home in the Mountain West Conference, which would mean they'd be going from a fiscal year 2022 payout of $37 million from the PAC-12 to a Mountain West distribution of $6.6 million, which would leave them no choice but to slash sports. They did nothing wrong, but they've been left to a brutal fate.
www.deseret.com
