What the Pac-10 Needs To Do

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Footbaw.

The Pac-10 is in an odd spot. It has no conference title game, and doesn’t need one, because everyone plays everyone else. In addition, with only three conference games, you would think teams would be more anxious about getting gimmes, and yet Pac-10 teams tend to go out and get Big Televen or SEC opponents in those spots. I think a few years back USC’s three non-cons were Notre Dame, Arkansas and Va Tech. California seems to have a Big Ten opponent pretty much every year. And looking at last year’s bowl performance, it seems like things are working out, given that the Pac-10 teams in bowls all won.

And yet, the Pac-10 gets no respect on a national level, it seems. Pac-10 officiating is the joke of the NCAA – the inconsistency is a show, and they always seem to fluff things in full view of the entire country – and it seems like every time something’s gone awry with the BCS, it’s always at the expense of a Pac-10 team. So what can the Pac-10 do to get back to national prominence? They can fix their biggest problems, in no particular order:

1) THE TV PACKAGE SUCKS. When people complain about “East Coast Bias,” what they should be complaining about is the TV deal, because that’s how people become aware of teams. Look at the other schools…Notre Dame bought their own broadcast network in 1990. The Big Ten has its own cable channel. Literally every SEC game is being televised this year thanks to a huge deal with CBS and ESPN that will let the Southeastern Conference reach a bigger percentage of Americans than anybody since Miles Standish said “ok, time to get off the boat.”

But the Pac-10’s secondary deal (after ABC’s Game of the Week, usually in prime time) is with…drumroll…Fox Sports Net. The tertiary deal is with…Versus. VERSUS. The Pac-10’s third-biggest game of the week is being sandwiched in between bull riding and Tour de France reruns. Ask a hockey fan about Versus. Then plug your ears. Honestly, FSN is no better, because they’re showing the #2 game in prime time…ON THE WEST COAST. These games are kicking off at 10 PM in the East, where college fans who have been drinking for 14 hours already are almost completely unable to get stuck into another three and a half hours of action unless they are complete degenerates. And the people who vote in polls are a completely different sort of degenerate. If the Pac-10 is going to get back on top, the first thing to do is blow up the TV packages and, if necessary, take less money to get the games on a network that will take football seriously. NBC is in dire straits – Notre Dame only seems to get half above suckitude one year in four, the Arena League just bit the dust, NASCAR is on Sundays…they have plenty of time and nothing competing. Get on the horn and make a deal – a fourth place network can be had cheap. And from there, they can work on fixing the fact that…

2) THE BOWL PACKAGE SUCKS OUT LOUD. Pasadena, San Diego, El Paso (!?!?), Las Vegas, San Francisco, San Diego again. Those are the Pac-10 bowl tie-ins, and they’re not the sort of thing that’s going to make people back East sit up and say “let’s have a look at that,” because none of them are back East. A top-10 Cal team got my attention in 1991 because they went to the Citrus Bowl and gave Clemson the beatdown, so it’s not like those teams can’t travel. But consider this: if you finish 3rd or even 4th in the SEC or Big Ten, you’re going to be playing on New Year’s Day, thanks to tie-ins with the Citrus, Cotton and Outback bowls. How many times in the last ten years has a team that finished second in the Pac-10 and ranked in the top 10 nationally played their bowl game on a weeknight in San Diego a couple of days after Christmas? It is incumbent on the new Pac-10 commissioner to blow up the existing bowl tie-ins at the first opportunity and make some deals that will get the Pac-10 teams playing on January 1 where people can see them. Other than…

3) USC. Anytime somebody mentions Pac-10 football and “East Coast bias,” the simple retort is “USC.” Darlings of ESPN, voted national champions by the Associated Press in 2003 despite a third-place BCS finish (if the East Coast bias is so great, how come Auburn of the mighty SEC didn’t get a whiff of similar consideration the following year?), the Trojans are America’s Team in the eyes of the national press, with Pete Carroll as the second coming of Bear Bryant and the incumbent QB invariably becoming LA’s male answer to Paris Hilton or Lindsey Lohan. They are ubiquitous, they are inexorable, and they have basically sucked the oxygen out of the rest of the league.

This is the biggest problem the Pac-10 faces. For the last decade, the only way to keep USC out of the Rose Bowl has been to make it the national championship game and put somebody else in it…or put the national championship game somewhere else and put USC in it. Southern California has won the last seven Pac-10 titles in a row – read that sentence again – and despite sharing some of those, nobody else has taken their spot on Colorado Avenue on New Years’ morning. USC’s game is usually the Pac 10’s game of the week, which means they spend more time on ABC than those harpies on The View…at the expense of nine other teams. Not for nothing do certain members of the blogosphere refer to the conference as the “Pac-One.”

Unfortunately, it’s also the thing that the conference can do the least about, with one exception: the NCAA is combining their probes of the Reggie Bush and OJ Mayo recruiting scandals into one big super-probe of USC athletics. This is the exact sort of investigation that laid waste to Alabama football in the late 1990s, because there is nothing the NCAA loves more than to bust out the whoopin’ stick on a big-time program just to prove that they can and will. In Alabama’s case, despite no finding of lack of institutional control or individual culpability on the part of any university employee, the school was supposedly “staring down the barrel of the death penalty.” Which means that it is entirely possible that USC could be facing the risk of disproportionate punishment as well.

While the Pac-10 conference office doesn’t need to egg on the NCAA, they should resist the temptation to try to shield their cash cow from the wrath of the big bad bully from Indianapolis. I distinctly remember seeing Washington fans in the early 90s in their “Pac-9: If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Put ‘Em On Probation” t-shirts, so it’s not like the league has gone out of its way to protect its heavy hitters in the past.

Long story short: there’s not that much that needs doing for the Pac-10 to climb the ranks again, but it’s going to take an active commitment on the part of the conference management to get there. There is absolutely no reason why a conference like the Big East should have an edge on the Pac-10, let alone a bunch of halfwits like the MWC or (gah!) the WAC, and it’s all because the previous administration thought that things were fine just as they were. But it’s time to adapt – and the schools are getting there, the conference just needs to catch up.