But it turned out the world wasn’t yet ready for what was being called the Airplane Conference. The five members joined back up with three of the other four major Western schools (sorry, Idaho) and soldiered on in what would eventually become the Pac-8, Pac-10 (with Arizona and Arizona State) and Pac-12 (with Utah and Colorado).
Apparently, the world is ready for a couple of Airplane Conferences now. It had better be, anyway. In 2022, the Big Ten broke geography by announcing it was adding USC and UCLA to its otherwise mostly Midwestern ranks. And Friday, the most momentous (and, to some, devastating) day of this entire conference realignment era, something once unthinkable unfolded. The Big Ten also decided to add Oregon and Washington, while the Big 12, having already re-added Colorado a week earlier, accepted applications from Arizona, Arizona State and Utah.
The Pac-12 is now a Pac-4, with only Cal, Oregon State, Stanford and Washington State remaining. And for really only the second time in the history of college football, we have witnessed the downfall of a power conference. As with the SWC in the mid-1990s, some soon-to-be former Pac-12 schools face a lucrative future with some exciting (and some less exciting) new conference rivalries on the horizon. Others, meanwhile, have been left behind to face a murky future.
The Pac-8/10/12: A conference of almosts and what-ifs
With many of its founding schools rather risk-averse and focused on success in Olympic sports, even to the potential detriment of football success, the Pac-Whatever always operated a little differently from other conferences. It is the only conference to claim over 500 national titles in all sports, but wow, did it still have plenty of moments on the gridiron.
It gave us a couple of all-time runs from USC — eight top-five finishes and three national titles from 1967 to 1979, then seven straight top-fours and two more titles from 2002 to 2008.
It gave us Washington’s brief turn as the best program in the country in the early 1990s.
It gave us John Elway and Aaron Rodgers, Junior Seau and Ronnie Lott, Warren Moon and Ryan Leaf, Anthony Munoz and Jonathan Ogden, Troy Aikman and Dan Fouts and Andrew Luck, Ahmad Rashad and Chad Johnson, Tedy Bruschi and Rey Maualuga, Marcus Allen and Marshawn Lynch, Richard Sherman and Gronk, and multiple McCaffreys.
It gave us Pat Tillman.
It gave us countless thrillers and nonsense moments that kept us up way past our bedtimes on Saturday nights into Sunday mornings.
It also gave us too many what-ifs and almosts to count. Arizona State nearly won a national title in 1996 behind the work of Tillman and quarterback Jake “the Snake” Plummer but fell in the final seconds of an epic Rose Bowl. UCLA almost played for the national title in 1998 but lost a late-season heartbreaker to Miami on one of the sport’s greatest Saturdays. Cal came up six points short of an unbeaten regular season and potential BCS championship bid in 2004. USC’s run of dominance could have included a couple more rings if not for single, devastating losses in 2005 (to Texas) and 2008 (to Oregon State). Oregon suffered its own BCS heartbreaker against Auburn in 2010, came up three points short of making it again in 2012 thanks to Stanford, then fell in the championship of the first College Football Playoff in 2014. Stanford lost only to Oregon in the 2010 and 2011 regular seasons and, for good measure, had a trio of tight Heisman second-place finishes from 2009 to 2011.
None of the schools responsible for this is dropping football, obviously. Any of them could find future glory with just the right set of moves, especially those landing particularly cushy Big Ten bids. But all the great players and great teams above plied their trade within a Western identity shared by programs with very, very long marriages. Now most of them will go off to join conferences based in far different time zones, racking up frequent-flier miles in the process.
The almosts, of course, bleed over into the realignment game, too. Thirteen summers ago, Larry Scott’s Pac-10 looked as if it might add seven-time national champion Oklahoma and four-time champ Texas to its roster, among others, becoming the nation’s preeminent football conference in the process and potentially striking a death blow of sorts against the Big 12. (You can probably forgive fans of once-vulnerable Big 12 schools such as Kansas State and Iowa State for not feeling particularly bad about the Pac-12’s eventual fate.)
Due to some combination of hesitation from conference commissioners and cold feet from Texas, however, Scott couldn’t get the proverbial ball across the goal line. Confined by geography and undone by a number of unforced errors, the conference quickly ran out of moves to play and opportunities for bigger media rights deals. Once the Big Ten decided to break geography, the game was on its way to ending.
We’ll never know how genuinely close the Pac-16 came to existence, but it sure seemed awfully close. And its failure set the table for the slow and steady downfall that followed.
Some quick compliment sandwiches
I’m not going to lie: The finality of these recent developments has roughed me up a bit. I wasn’t writing about college football when the SWC met its maker (I was in high school), so this is a new experience. And to keep the tone from growing too dour, let’s make some good, old-fashioned compliment sandwiches.
Sandwich No. 1
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Compliment: Oregon and Washington are good programs, and while we dramatize the particularly odd Big Ten matchups we’ll see in the coming years — Oregon-Northwestern, Washington-Indiana, USC-Maryland or UCLA-Rutgers — we’ll also get fun ones such as Oregon-Ohio State (2014 title game rematch!) and Washington-Michigan (1978, 1981, 1992 and 1993 Rose Bowl rematch!). Granted, we got that latter game in 2021 nonconference play. But it’s still neat.
Complaint: When Missouri and Texas A&M joined the Southeastern Conference, people acted like it was geographic sacrilege. But Missouri and Texas both bordered SEC states, and for Mizzou, Nashville and Fayetteville aren’t that much farther away than Ames, Iowa, and Lincoln, Nebraska, and having to drive a solid distance to Athens, Georgia, or Columbia, South Carolina, is really no different from driving to Lubbock or Austin, as fans did in the Big 12. It stretched geographic bounds but not obnoxiously so.
I said above that the Big Ten broke geography; it didn’t just break it, it destroyed it. Oregon and Washington both accepted junior membership with media rights payouts far lower than soon-to-be peers, all for the honor of joining a conference for which fan road trips are virtually unimaginable — even less imaginable than, say, Oregon-Stanford or Washington-Arizona games. Washington fans are never going to be in position to make a weekend trip to, say, Iowa City, and Iowa fans can’t drive to Seattle, either. It’s like they’re joining a neighborhood homeowners association and paying dues without actually getting to live in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, the athletes have to make the trip whether they actually have the time to do so or not.
Of course, the West is pretty expansive, and road trips were already pretty tricky. But after already losing Bedlam (Oklahoma-Oklahoma State, done in by OU’s SEC move), we’re also losing a couple more of the most delirious conference rivalries in sports — Oregon-Oregon State and Washington-Wazzu — and replacing them with Oklahoma-Vanderbilt, Washington-Illinois and Oregon-Maryland. No one asked for this, and very few people benefit from it. There’s obviously a chance the rivalries live on as future nonconference games — Washington says it is “committed” to continuing the Apple Cup — but recent history suggests at best there will be a gap before we get these games back on the schedule, if they reappear at all.
Compliment: Nothing is permanent. We’re getting Texas-Texas A&M, Texas-Arkansas and a personal favorite, Oklahoma-Missouri, back with next year’s SEC expansion. Realignment takes things away and sometimes gives them back. We’ll see what the future holds.
Sandwich No. 2
Compliment: The Holy War, BYU vs. Utah, is now not only a power conference rivalry but also maybe the most storied such rivalry. That’s pretty cool. We’re keeping the Territorial Cup, Arizona vs. Arizona State, too, and the Backyard Brawl (Pitt–West Virginia) was rekindled as a nonconference affair in 2022 and is scheduled to take place in seven of the next 10 seasons as well. Small blessings.
Complaint: It’s really not hard to see where things might go from here. The nationalization of what once grew popular as a regional sport doesn’t automatically have to be an entirely bad thing, but schools’ desperate willingness to ditch longtime homes and regional rivals in favor of geographically nonsensical conferences and more lucrative futures certainly feels like only step one toward a future with even more nationalization and a much more severe winnowing of the field. As USA Today’s Dan Wolken put it, “We have 40 years of data telling us exactly where this enterprise is heading, and nobody is going to like it except the handful of schools at the very top.”
Or as ESPN’s Rece Davis put it, “I’ve said, ‘what happens when the next iteration of this is ‘why are we sharing money with programs that don’t contribute as much and aren’t as attractive”’. The golden ticket a few hold now might disappear.”
The doomsday scenario for so many college football lovers has been some sort of ghastly super league in which the Ohio States, Michigans, USCs, Alabamas and Georgias play only each other and leave behind all but the top 20 or 30 brands. That doesn’t have to be where things go from here, but with no one in charge of the sport’s overall well-being and schools acting of their own volition to secure their own future riches at the expense of others, this is exactly how a super league would take shape. (I’ll return to this point in a bit.)
Compliment: No, seriously, the Holy War rules. It’s going to rule even more now.
Honestly, I’m not sure this exercise made me feel better. But on we go.
What the Big Ten is getting in Oregon and Washington
If we’re being honest, adding four Western programs makes more sense for the conference than adding two. Theoretically, with a nine-game conference football schedule USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington can all play each other annually, leaving only six games against cross-country opponents and only three massive, multi-time-zone trips east each year instead of the four the Trojans and Bruins were facing on their own. Granted, it could also mean more long trips west for everyone else, but the teams out West will always be the ones traveling the most, and now they’ll travel slightly less.
Plus, aside from Clemson and (if it now has its act together again) Florida State, Oregon and Washington were just about the most consistently excellent football brands still available. In the 15 seasons from 2008 to 2022, Oregon produced the best overall SP+ rating of this future 18-team amalgamation on three occasions (2010, 2012, 2013) and ranked in the top six 10 times. Washington, meanwhile, has ranked in the top eight nine times in the past 10 years and in the top 5 five times. They both produce top-notch home-game environments, too, and they’re building well for the future. Oregon’s Dan Lanning is an obvious up-and-comer in the coaching ranks, and Washington’s Kalen DeBoer has been good at every football job he’s ever had.
The Big Ten is adding legitimate depth to an already awesome conference. If this 18-team Big Ten existed in 2023, it would house five of the top 11 teams, and eight of the top 24, in the preseason SP+ projections. That’s pretty good.
What the Big 12 is getting in its new Four Corners schools
We were just getting used to the idea of a Big 12 that was losing its two heavyweights and adding four exciting (but not elite) programs. Now, it’s adding four more. Next year, a 16-team Big 12 will expand from Utah and Arizona to West Virginia and Orlando. As with the Big Ten, the way it has now fortified its left flank will allow for fewer wacky, cross-country, UCF-Arizona or WVU-BYU style matchups. But what does the conference actually have now from a football standpoint?
To begin addressing that, I’ll do what I usually do: look at recent SP+ rankings. Here’s how this 16-team Frankenstein would have taken shape over the past 10 years according to SP+. The four newest newcomers are in bold.
So basically, this conference will have a top-10 caliber team about two-thirds of the time and average about four top-25 caliber teams and eight top-40 caliber teams in a given season. Besides Utah, the other three additions haven’t added all that much quality of late, but Utah will be an immediate annual conference title contender, and both Colorado (Deion Sanders) and Arizona State (Kenny Dillingham) boast charismatic new coaches who are leaning heavily on transfers to turn their respective programs around.
Maybe it’ll work and maybe it won’t, but it’ll be interesting to follow. And my goodness, the chaos and track-meet potential of a conference that features both Arizona schools, Texas Tech, Houston and UCF, among all the other occasionally chaotic programs, is incredible. The spirit of Pac-12 After Dark will live on, even if the Pac-12 will not.
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What’s next for the four remaining Pac-12 schools?
Pete Thamel breaks down the directions Cal, Stanford, Oregon State and Washington State could go after the latest conference realignment.
The leftovers can still thrive
In 2009, Cincinnati came within one second in Arlington of a spot in the BCS title game. From 2007 to 2012, the Bearcats won double-digit games four times in five years. And in 2013, they no longer held major-conference status. They didn’t escape the Big East before it became the AAC, and that was that. Through no fault of their own, their status shifted overnight.
It took them a decade to work their way back. After stumbling under Tommy Tuberville — really the only poor hire the school has made this century — the Bearcats surged under Luke Fickell, going 44-7 from 2018 to 2021 and becoming the first school from a non-power conference to reach the College Football Playoff. That opened the door for a Big 12 invitation.
TCU needed longer. The Horned Frogs had averaged just 4.7 wins per year over their past decade in the SWC (and 3.5 over their past quarter-century) and battled NCAA probation. (Nothing like cheating and still losing, huh?) Their struggles, along with some politicking, allowed Baylor to snag the final spot in the new Big 12. TCU spent five years in the WAC, four in Conference USA and seven in the Mountain West before working its way into the Big 12 with an all-time great hire (Gary Patterson) and a run of three AP top-10 finishes and a Rose Bowl title.
Houston followed a similar path. Beset by NCAA sanctions in the final years of the SWC, it lost out on a Big 12 bid and spent 17 years in Conference USA before moving up to the AAC in 2013. The Cougars won the Peach Bowl and finished in the AP top 10 in 2015, then surged to a 12-2 season in 2021 just as the Big 12 was figuring out whom to invite.
Oregon State and Washington State haven’t been Cincinnati- or TCU-level good of late. But after a rough go, OSU jumped to 7-6 in 2021 and 10-3 in 2022, beating the Big Ten-bound (!) Oregon and walloping the SEC’s Florida to finish the season. Washington State, meanwhile, has bowled for seven of the last eight years and finished in the AP top 10 as recently as 2018. Colorado has been good once in 17 seasons, and Arizona has gone 15-38 over the past five seasons, but they still got Big 12 lifeboats. OSU and Wazzu, more isolated far up in the Northwest, got nothing. While we don’t know for sure how things will play out, it sure looks like they’re staring at potential Mountain West membership in the near future, mostly because of small markets and happenstance.
Cal and Stanford might be in the same boat — if their leaders can stomach the thought of being associated with programs they had no interest in allowing into the Pac-12, anyway. Their academic standards and overall athletic prowess, especially that of annual Learfield Cup contender Stanford, might be attractive to the Big Ten (albeit at even more of a discount rate than what Oregon and Washington got) or a desperate ACC. Maybe they pursue independence in the short term, just in case.
Now, if we’re being honest, most of these schools — especially OSU and Wazzu — haven’t really recruited at a power-conference level of late. The Beavers’ and Cougars’ success has come from picking the right three-star recruits and transfers, and there’s no reason they can’t follow that recipe if they end up in a Mountain West that their own presence would improve. For the next couple of years especially, with a College Football Playoff that will feature 12 teams and six auto-bids (with one fewer conference to snag a bid), you could make the case that these schools’ respective paths to a potential playoff bid just got a lot more open and interesting if they have their act together. There is plenty of opportunity at hand if the programs are operated well. But make no mistake: This is brutal for those schools, just as it was for the SWC’s cast-offs in the 1990s and for the Big East schools that became AAC schools.
Progress at a cost
A few years ago, with a different employer, I declared that I was running for college football commissioner and created a campaign platform for a fairer and healthier future version of college football. This position obviously didn’t exist (and still doesn’t), but in the years that followed, we actually saw a lot of progress when it comes to expanded player rights and, soon, an expanded and more inclusive College Football Playoff. (Hell, we’re making the games shorter, too. It’s all happening! Except for promotion and relegation, anyway.)
I’ve gotten a lot of what I wanted, but I’m not sure I’ve ever felt worse about the future of college football than I have over the past few days. Why?
I think a lot of this contradiction comes from one simple fact: There’s still no one overseeing this sport and, in theory, pursuing its best present and future interests. The thought of a college football commissioner is not new, but without such a centralized figure, and with schools and conferences pursuing only their own interests at the expense of everything else, worst-case scenarios become self-fulfilling prophecies. Everyone fears getting left behind and acts accordingly, even if it breaks century-old rivalries and geography itself and leads us down a road everyone says they don’t want to travel.
None of the developments of the past 40 years had to be bad for the sport. NCAA v. Board of Regents, the Supreme Court case that stopped the NCAA from limiting television opportunities — opening the door for ESPN and other networks to televise college football games from noon to midnight on fall Saturdays — certainly didn’t. Conference expansion didn’t, nor did the creation of a College Football Playoff. Allowing athletes to profit off of their name, image and likeness certainly didn’t. Similarly, the expansion of said CFP doesn’t have to be a bad thing, nor does a future in which some judge (in any number of court cases) or the Supreme Court itself declares student-athletes are employees and, potentially, revenue should be shared with them in some way.
But without centralized leadership — especially without good centralized leadership — and without anyone attempting to manage the big picture, every change further establishes a predatory, survival-of-the-fittest free-for-all. And it takes us to a place where we have no Apple Cup, no Bedlam and Washington-Purdue conference matchups no one asked for.
Even sports with commissioner figures can obviously stumble into problems. NASCAR has a president but, as Ryan McGee wrote a couple of years ago, still managed to create a number of college football-esque problems for itself: “At some point, the leadership bought into the assumption that their core fan base would always have their backs no matter what they did. So, they abandoned their roots, leaving traditional racetracks and ditching decades-long annual race dates for flashier new facilities in sexier new markets. … The sport had also wandered so far from its base that the old-school fans were nowhere to be found, having departed the less-charming present in search of nostalgia.”
Still, imagine what a Jerry Jones or George Steinbrenner might have done without an NFL or MLB commissioner. Imagine the predatory world that could have produced. Really, you don’t have to imagine it at all — we’re seeing it with college sports.
It has been almost 30 years since the Big Ten and SEC expanded, paving the way for the creation of the Big 12 (and the SWC’s corresponding demise) and the super-conference era. It’s been 25 years since the BCS was introduced to determine an actual national champion and further nationalize college football. I mention this to point out the wheels have been in motion for a while, but I also want to note that 30 years is a long time! And we haven’t yet stumbled into the Super League scenario a lot of us dread. There’s nothing saying we have to end up there, and at any point this sport could start steering itself in a different direction.
But the leadership structure being what it is, we pretty much know where things are headed. NCAA leaders have recently argued in front of Congress that paying players and/or allowing much freer player movement is creating an existential crisis for the sport. But their leadership, and that of the more powerful conference commissioners and university presidents, created an environment in which Oregon can leave Oregon State for Rutgers. If that’s not an existential crisis, I really don’t know what is.
Unless someone grabs the proverbial steering wheel — something that didn’t even happen after the appalling and nearly disastrous run-up to the 2020 COVID season — we will continue to sleepwalk toward a more and more top-heavy and NFL-like structure that no college football fan asked for and everyone says they don’t want.
Maybe we will all continue watching and loving the sport if that happens, and maybe a lot of us won’t. I don’t really want to find out.
