Goodbye to the PAC 12
 

Last PAC 12 game with the U of Washington facing Michigan for the CFC, the irony.
Go figure, the league that made the others use the forward pass will be no more.
Never gonna be a Big 10 fan, a Buckeye is still a worthless nut.
It will soon implode until there are only two left.

Isn’t that already the case? With O and W joining the B10, that’s the end of relevancy for the Pac-12.

It will be interesting to see the criteria for next year’s CFP. Assuming strength of schedule factors in, the majority of the 12 teams will represent the SEC and B10.

NCAA-1 (Alabama Conference)
NCAA-2 (Western Conference)

College ball has changed. For the better?

Both my son and I are WSU graduates. A lot of my buddies who are alums are crying foul about the way the PAC 12 imploded and how unfair it was for WSU and OSU. Who cares. College football and basketball are basically pro minor leagues. The idea of a student athlete is a joke and has been for decades. It's about the $'s and a very select few moving to the pros. I worked in the dorm system when I was an undergrad, and dealt with a ton of football players and coaches. Seeing how the sausage is made makes one very cynical about college sports, or the big ones anyway.

How many millions are they getting to play? Shiiit, they don’t even hide it anymore

The NIL program has led to huge money for some players....esp new highly recruited ones.
It's all legal now.

A point well made.

I'm also a WSU grad (Go Cougs!) and was at WSU during the Drew Bledsoe days. I had tickets to the games for my freshman year but got completely turned off to college sports when I watched the Astroturf going in while all us engineering students had to donate a ream of paper each to math and engineering departments...

Yup. Beyond that, the very most exploitative, racist meat grinder extant today. These kids are no more than livestock - the recruiting and coaching staffs fall just short of checking their teeth and hooves when reviewing recruits. They take them in, chew them up, and spit them out with nary a care in the world. The 99% that don't make it to (much less in) the NFL have nothing to fall back on, their "college degrees" being worth functionally less than the very paper on which they are written. Pretty hard to care just which schools are making how much money exploiting these kids and filling them with so much false promise. And the ones filling the bleachers, driving the revenue, are cast aside after four years like a used condom. Yeah, I might be a bit cynical...

^^^ That's a bit harsh Jeff. Actually it's only 98.4% who don't make it to the pro level. :cool:

I wrote an economics paper in college based on my experiences first as a guy who lost a scholarship to injury and then as a tutor to the football and basketball teams at the university.

I agree with what has been written above, with perhaps the exception of NIL.

A few things:

- Scholarships are year to year and can be pulled at any time.
- The NCAA is a toothless hag that adheres to rules of zero merit or influence
- The dollars, even when I wrote the paper in 1981, associated with college football are ginormous. They are X Ginormous today.
- NIL and the transfer portal need guardrails but are central to breaking the lock schools had on their scholarship athletes. Coaches came and went as they saw fit, why not the players?

So, here, from memory, were the central tenets of the paper, again, 1981:

- Once awarded, a scholarship is for five years. The only exception is a criminal offense on the part of the player or failure to attain a 2.5 GPA or non attendance in class. A played cannot lose a scholarship to injury.

- For contact sports, minimal classes during the season and the player accrues an additional semester for each season he plays a contact sport. A college football game is a car crash.

- If a player does not make it to the pros, and the numbers are harsh, the player can then finish his degree using his accrued semesters, free of charge. The player must maintain a 3.0 GPA or higher however for these bonus semesters. Failure to do so means probation and one more "free" semester to turn it around.

- I mentioned a small stipend for each player.

Like others here, a saw the abuse up close and personal.

Well written essay on the subject:

https://lawliberty.org/college-footballs-death-march

Excerpt:

I don’t expect college football to collapse immediately. It may well enjoy a short-term bounce in popularity next year when the new playoff system debuts. But that same system will only hasten the erosion of the things that once made college football lovable. There will be more desperate attempts at defibrillation, but the ratings will continue to slip, as aging fans like me seem increasingly quaint to the juniors. If I’m alive fifty years hence, I may still be able to watch the Rose Bowl from my retirement home, but I’m guessing that I and my fellow residents will be the prime audience. “What’s a Rose Bowl?” may be the great-grandkids’ only question.

I do not like the transfer portal at all.

It just feeds the immediate satisfaction culture we seem to be creating.

Its one of the reasons I like players like Brock Purdy, who started 4 years at Iowa State and stayed there, showing his character.

So, what we have in these paragraphs, my father and his father would have described as common sense. It implies that the education and the promise of a college degree is the main reason for the so called 'student athlete' to be admitted to a school through scholarship. Everything else is secondary. All requirements of that education must be met in order to earn a degree. Seems simple enough.

Just hit me, I’m sitting down to watch the last game of any relevance played by a Pac 12 team.

I’ve always been a homer. I’ve always rooted for the Big East (Rutgers) and ACC (Maryland) teams but the significance of the end of an organization that has been around for 108 years isn’t lost on me.

Yep...but keep in mind, Washington is no longer a PAC 12 team...there is no PAC12.

I get your point, but they are a PAC12 team until the end of this game.

My PAC roots run deep. My granddad graduated from OSU, as did my father and at least three uncles. So did my one of my sisters, one of my brothers, several of my cousins and many, many friends. My father was the sports editor of the Gazette Times in Corvallis, back in the day of Slats Gill and Tommy Prothro, (when it was still the PCC) and wrote a daily column as well. Heck, my mother claims that I was conceived at the 1957 Rose Bowl (well, maybe not at the Rose Bowl proper, but during the trip to cover the game). I was born on October 8th, so the timing is certainly right.

Having gone to UO, I'm the green sheep of my family and have been subjected to a fair amount of scorn over the years ... although Mom insists she forgives me ... scorn that's been particularly pointed since we "abandoned" the Beavs and Cougs.

_

As discussed before, Tennessee's frosh QB got an $8M NIL deal before he played a down at Tennessee. Played so little last this past season that he was eligible to redshirt.

Article discusses how the deal had negative impact on Tennessee players.

https://offthehooksports.com/2023/12/12/why-the-tennessees-deal-with-qb-nico-iamaleava-deal-no-longer-so-great-for-the-vols/

As one James Bond theme song says, "This is the end, hold your breath and count to ten". I don't see how this can continue and for how much longer it can at this pace.

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