Pac-12 Slander: It Needs to Stop
Lack of success in football and men’s basketball leads the public perception awry
Year in and year out, the Pacific-12 Conference gets brutally torn apart by the national media for not being “relevant” or “competitive” in the money-making sports, football, and men’s basketball.
In a 2020 episode of ESPN’s television show, Pardon The Interruption, host Tony Kornheiser stated that, “I want everyone to play. But under Larry Scott, the Pac-12 has become completely irrelevant in basketball and football. One of the greatest conferences of all time. Nobody knows they exist anymore.” Granted, Scott was replaced by George Kliavkoff in July of 2021 in hopes of improving performance of the aforementioned sports.
Kliavkoff, who was the president of entertainment and sports for MGM Resorts International before taking over for Scott in July, is tasked with fixing the mess that the former left him. The current television station for the conference, Pac-12 Networks, is not available on several streaming platforms. If Kliavkoff can find a way to fix the television issue and allow more fans around the country to watch the Pac-12, the public’s views should change with it.
To Kornheiser’s point however, the Pac-12 has not won a football national championship since 2004 when the University of Southern California defeated the University of Oklahoma 55–19. Men’s basketball goes back even further to when the University of California Los Angeles defeated the University of Arkansas 89–78 to win the 1994–95 national championship.
One could argue that despite the lack of a Pac-12 team raising a trophy for almost two decades, the conference has stayed quite competitive.
As we sit, there are five Pac-12 football teams ranked in the Associated Press Top-25 poll, second amongst conferences. In the most recent NCAA Men’s basketball tournament, more famously known as, “March Madness,” the Pac-12 put on the most impressive showing outside of the BIG-12 whom the National Champion, Baylor University, belongs to.
In the Sweet Sixteen, four Pac-12 teams competed, three of which advanced to the Elite Eight, and one, UCLA, advanced all the way to the Final Four.
Once you step off the hardwood and the gridiron, is when the excellence and dominance of the Pac-12 really shows.
The Pac-12 slogan, “The Conference of Champions,” rings true, totaling 537 national championships, the only conference with more than 500.
Since the 1981–82 athletic season when the Pac-12 officially sponsored women’s sports, the conference has averaged nine national championships per year. Additionally, five Pac-12 schools find themselves in the top-15 in total national championships per school. Stanford University leads the way at the №1 overall spot with 128 championships. Rounding out the top three are UCLA with 119 and USC with 110. The University of California at Berkeley ranks №11 with 38 and the University of Oregon is just behind them with 33 at №13.
To reiterate the dominance of the Pac-12, the conference would have placed fifth in the 2020 Summer Olympics, with 60 total medals, 17 being gold.
With all of this being said, it is no secret to the viewers at home that the Pac-12 needs to turn it around in football and men’s basketball. The conference has not had a football team get selected into the four-team playoff since 2017, when Washington got throttled in the national semi-final, 24–7, by eventual national runner-up, the University of Alabama. Before that, Oregon made it to the inaugural College Football Playoff championship game in 2014. The Ducks put a severe beat down on Florida State University, 59–20, in the national semi-final, before a disappointing loss to Ohio State University, 42–20 in the national championship game.
So yeah, the Pac-12 has had its chances to prove itself at a national level and has ended up falling short, time and time again. With the new commissioner and a newly coined “alliance” with the BIG-10 conference and the Athletic Coast Conference, the conference is looking to be more competitive and improve their national image.
With plenty of more opportunities on the horizon for the conference to prove themselves to critics in the media, the Pac-12 will hopefully take advantage and once again earn their spot back as a perennial powerhouse conference in all sports.
