The State of Pac-12 Football

The Pac-12 has been suffering greatly in the past couple of years. The conference, which consists of Washington Huskies of Seattle, Washington State Cougars of Pullman, Oregon Ducks of Eugene, Oregon State Beavers of Corvallis, California-Berkeley, also known as just Cal Golden Bears of Berkeley, Stanford Cardinal of Stanford, University of Southern California, or USC Trojans of Los Angeles, University of California-Los Angeles, or UCLA Bruins of Los Angeles, Arizona Wildcats of Tucson, Arizona State Sun Devils of Tempe, Utah Utes of Salt Lake City, and Colorado Buffaloes of Boulder. A lot of these schools are not getting much attention from people on the east coast. 

Why are they not getting the attention they might deserve? One reason is just simply the time zone differences. A lot of the games are being started at 7 pm Pacific Coast Time. That’s 10 pm East Coast Time. I mean, I probably wouldn’t stay up at 10 pm to watch the game unless it was my team. I’d probably just watch the highlights the morning of the next day. So to back this up I looked at the viewership of the Pac-12 championship compared to the other conference championship. The Pac-12 championship viewership was 5.86 million views, the SEC  had 13.7 million, the ACC had 3.97 million, the Big Ten had 13.55 million, and the Big 12 had 8.70 million.  Another reason why they are just not getting attention is that there is not one pure dominant team or teams. You look at the SEC, they have LSU, Alabama, and Georgia. In the ACC it's Clemson, in the Big Ten, it's Ohio State, and in the Big 12, it's Oklahoma. The Pac-12 just doesn’t have it. There are some spurts of greatness from USC, Stanford, Utah, Oregon, or Washington, but there is no big team for the country to take notice of. The conference is so tightly knit together in competition. Another reason why the Pac-12 is struggling to get attention is that they just aren’t winning those tough games. I went back to the 2019 season and the Pac-12 was 8-5 against Power 5 teams. However, I found that stat misleading because then I looked at the Pac-12’s record against out-of-conference teams ranked in the final AP rankings and the Pac-12’s record is 2-10 with the only wins coming in the bowl games. 

  So is there hope? Yes, there is. The Pac-12 needs to get a dominant team for a few years and there are a few teams to look at. Oregon has been very good, Utah is very underrated, USC has a solid team and a large national profile, Washington is usually good, and a couple of dark horse candidates like Cal, UCLA, or Arizona State could. Through this, the Pac-12 will draw more recruits from out east of the Mississippi and keep their in-state top recruits. So you can see they do have the potential to, in theory, make a big splash in football.