Et Tu, Brutus?

The Big Ten puts the final stake through the Pac-12's dying heart

It’s all over the but the crying in the land of pleasant living, now that the ‘Bigs’ of college athletics have their sights set on the West’s last top-line conference.

Both conferences are set to pillage the Pac-12 of at least four (and as many as six) members, with the Arizona schools and Utah absconding to the Big 12 with Colorado, while Oregon and Washington follow UCLA and USC to the Big Ten.

There’s a bit of Latin that’s been stuck in my head ever since the Trojans and their crosstown rivals lit fire to the Pac-12’s Carthage two years ago, that being the three-word tour de force that Shakespeare brought to life in “Julius Caesar.”

That phrase is “Et Tu, Brute?” which translates to “And you, Brutus?” — where the play’s protagonist’s final gasps revolve around the stunned realization that his longtime confidante was the one that put him six feet deep in the grave.

I can’t help but think back, time and time again, to how the Pac-12’s untimely downfall began back in 2022, when USC President Carol Folt and UCLA Chancellor Gene D. Block orchestrated an overnight coup after months of lip-service to Commissioner George Kliavkoff and the rest of the Pac-12 “CEO Group.”

Both saw the greenbacks that their new home in the heart of America’s Flyover Country could provide and made their peace with ditching the conference they helped found (if we’re including the former Pacific Coast Conference) in 1915.

Pac-12 Just The First Of Many To Reap What They’ve Sown

The diatribe above about a classic play from the late 16th century relates to today’s amateur sports scene, as I can’t help but think about all the Pac-12 fans who had their loyalties cut out from under them over the last 24 months.

I read a long Reddit post earlier today written by a diehard Washington State fan that begrudged the effect that the sextet of defectors will have on their Eastern Washington outpost of a university.

I can’t help but think that many of the defectors of today (looking at you, Arizona and Colorado) will be the next ones hurt by today’s money-hungry world of conference consolidation.

Who’s to say that in a few years, the powers-at-be in one of the “Big Two” conferences (or more likely, executives from ESPN or FOX) decide to go for the kill and further consolidate the college conference game?

In such a scenario, no one’s safe, with lower-tier Big 12 football schools (again, looking at you Arizona and Colorado) being among the schools that’ll take the place of the Oregon States and Washington States of today’s world.

The tide of consolidation is not going to stop just because the Pac-12 is dead and gone.

The result is that more and more fans of rural colleges will see their colleges kicked to the curb, replaced by the new class of nouveau rich universities.

In such a future, SEC also-rans like Arkansas, Mississippi State and South Carolina could get kicked to the curb, just like the Beavers and Cougars are getting pushed aside now.

The same is true in the land of milk, honey and brutally-boring football (just sub in Purdue and the entire Big Ten West for the above universities).

It’s safe to say that many of those that are taking great joy in watching the Pac-12 die a premature death will be the ones sowing the death of “traditional” collegiate athletics in five or ten years’ time.

It’s also safe to say that the Trojans and Bruins will not be the last Brutus-like figures to throw their conference homes into disarray.

We’ll see who’s laughing when the cards fall and the end game of decades of conference consolidation is upon us.