The last Pac-12 bowl season has come and gone. New Year’s Day featured the Washington Huskies soaring in the College Football Playoff semifinals at the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans against the Texas Longhorns. This was the eighth and final bowl game for 2023 Pac-12 football schools.
There were seven other Pac-12 bowls this season. UCLA, USC, Arizona, and Oregon won. Cal, Utah, and Oregon State lost. The one which really counted, though, was Washington-Texas. It marked the Pac-12’s first playoff game since the 2016 Peach Bowl in which the same Huskies lost to Nick Saban, Alabama, and a quarterback you might have heard of: Jalen Hurts.
The Pac-12 succeeded in its attempt to put a team in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game for the first time since the first season of the playoff’s existence. The 2014 college football season ended with Oregon facing Ohio State in the national championship game in January of 2015 in Arlington, Texas.
Oregon beating Liberty in the Fiesta Bowl was fully expected. Washington, though, was an underdog to Texas before a partisan Longhorn crowd in New Orleans. This is a final, glistening moment Pac-12 football fans will remember for a very long time … and maybe until the Pac-12 is potentially reborn in the mid-2030s.
We can only hope.
Visit our friends at Fighting Irish Wire, Buffaloes Wire, and Ducks Wire.