How The West Was Lost

How the Pac-12's demise mirrors the fall of history's greatest empires

The death of the west coast’s cornerstone collegiate conference was written in stone a decade ago.

While many will point their fingers at the Pac-12’s chief boogeymen, including greatest hits like Larry Scott and Michael Crow, the truth is the conference’s decade-long slide into irrelevancy is on the West’s hands at large.

As the buzzards gather and pick apart what’s left of the Pac-12’s bloated corpse, there will be no shortage of ink (both literal and figurative) spilled about the myriad of institutional failures that allowed brands like USC, UCLA and Colorado to slip away.

Still, I can’t help but think back to a timeless line from a Rolling Stones song and see how all of us played a bit role in the death march of the Pac-12 Conference.

From 1968’s smash hit (“Sympathy For The Devil”) from the album “Beggars Banquet”:

I shouted out
Who killed the Kennedys?
When after all
It was you and me

How The West Was Lost

As the title to this column alludes, all of us west of the Rockies share a role in the demise of the Pac-12, given the West’s general apathy towards collegiate sports and our continued acceptance of the status quo when it comes to our amateur athletics.

Based on data collected between 2018 and 2022, no Pac-12 school ranked inside the top-20 nationally when it came to college football per game attendance, with Washington finished atop the West (at No. 22 in the country).

While no one can blame students and alumni for steering clear of the Pac-12’s slew of bleary-eyed kickoff times and mediocre on-field product, that doesn’t change the bad optics that have held the Pac-12 back since signing their current TV deal with ESPN and FOX in 2012.

Since then, there have been zero national championships won in football or men’s basketball in the Pac-12, with the USC Trojans still holding the bag as the last member of the “Conference of Champions” to do either (no matter what the NCAA tells you, the Trojans did in fact shellack Oklahoma in the 2005 national championship game).

For reference as to how poorly the Pac-12’s members have packed the stands over the last five years, here’s where each member ranked on a national level in per-game attendance:

2018-2022 CFB Attendance Figures (per Yahoo Sports):

Arizona: 53rd (32,815.4 per game)

ASU: 43rd (37,602 per game)

Cal: 55th (32,255.6 per game)

Colorado: 45th (36,942.6 per game)

Oregon: 37th (42,205 per game)

Oregon State: 69th (25,311.4 per game)

Stanford: 64th (28,101.8 per game)

UCLA: 46th (36,484.8 per game)

USC: 28th (47,101.8 per game)

Utah: 40th (39,333.6 per game)

Washington: 22nd (52,511.2 per game)

Washington State: 77th (21,606.8 per game)

Why Academic Malaise Killed The Conference of Champions

As you can see, none of the conference’s 12 members covered themselves with glory, attendance-wise, over the last half-decade.

In short, when Washington — who filled roughly 74.9% of the stadium during the Huskies’ home games between 2017 and 2022 — is your standard-bearer for attendance, you know you’ve got problems on the home front.

Throw in the fact that the Pac-12 ranked sixth out of the 14 Division I men’s basketball conferences in attendance in 2022 (averaging 6,359 fans per game) and you have a rough portrait of the issues that have tanked the conference of late.

That general sporting malaise has allowed disinterested presidents, such as Stanford’s outgoing leader (Marc Tessier-Lavigne) and Cal-Berkeley Chancellor Carol T. Christ, to call the shots in the Pac-12 and drag their collective heels on much needed action.

Imagine a world where the Pac-12 was proactive, rather than reactive, after losing a pair of legacy brands in UCLA and USC last summer.

Instead, the academia arm of the conference clutched their collective pearls at the thought of adding non-AAU members like Boise State, Fresno State and … the entire Big 12 Conference — leading us to this hour of discontent on the country’s left coast.

Now, Tessier-Lavigne is on his way out after a research scandal (hat tip to the Stanford Daily for their reporting, by the way) and another member of the Pac-12 “CEO Group” (Colorado Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano) orchestrated a midnight exit back to the so-called “truck stop conference” that they used to call home.

That leaves little adult supervision at a time where deft moves are needed to prevent the battered yacht that is the Pac-12 from crashing into the nearest obstacle.

As the battered remnants of the fifth-oldest conference are picked over by a hoard of also-ran collectives over the coming weeks and months, don’t lose sight of who shares responsibility for our current state of discontent.

As Mick Jagger alluded to six decades ago, the culprits of the Pac-12’s hasty fall from grace are all around us.