The 2024 Pac-12 Women’s Basketball Tournament should be great fun. It should provide supreme drama and entertainment. The premier women’s college basketball conference in the country has six teams which could make the Sweet 16. It might get two No. 1 seeds in the Women’s NCAA Tournament. It could provide a level of success and achievement no other Power Five conference can come particularly close to matching. What’s sad, however, is that this conference — loaded with stars and great coaches — won’t exist next year. This was one of the topics we discussed on our new Pac-12 Women’s Basketball Tournament podcast at Trojans Wired with co-host and producer Ian Hest. Listen to the show for yourself, but here are some of the topics we discussed, including and especially our shared sadness that the Pac-12 women’s basketball world is coming to an end:
Lindsay Gottlieb was coaching against Tara VanDerveer and Stanford over a decade ago when she was at Cal. Gottlieb-VanDerveer is just one of several sensational coaching matchups in the Pac-12. Cori Close versus Scott Rueck. J.R. Payne versus Lynne Roberts. Kamie Ethridge versus Adia Barnes. Pick your matchup. This conference is stuffed with elite coaches. Ian made the point on the podcast about how much the quality of coaching has grown in the Pac-12 and women’s college basketball over the past several years. We’re going to miss these great coaching clashes in the Pac.
USC and UCLA will migrate to the Big Ten, so that matchup will continue, but we won’t get USC-Stanford or UCLA-Stanford anymore. That’s a crime. These are such great college basketball confrontations, part of the fabric of West Coast basketball. Not having these games in the future leaves a huge vacuum in women’s hoops.
Six Pac-12 teams are projected to get a top-six seed at the NCAA Tournament, and five of them are projected to get a top-four seed. The Pac-12 could easily put six teams in the Sweet 16. No other conference comes close. This is going away. This will not continue into next season. It’s a real shame, and it didn’t have to happen.
Pac-12 football had to move to the Big Ten to emerge from the obscurity (and revenue-poor world) of Pac-12 Network. Football had to escape the Pac-12. Did women’s basketball and the various Olympic sports need to leave, however? Separating football from other sports seems like a really good idea, and yet it didn’t really happen in this recent wave of conference realignment. It’s one of many areas where college sports leadership has been lacking. Pac-12 women’s basketball didn’t have to end. Pac-12 football did. There’s a difference.
The game of the year in women’s college basketball might have been Oregon State’s wild win over UCLA in Corvallis in February. There were several lead changes in the final 10 seconds. We won’t get Oregon State-UCLA, Oregon State-USC, or Oregon State-Colorado in future seasons. Again: It’s a shame.
Tara VanDerveer is the dean and icon of Pac-12 women’s basketball coaches. She has forced the rest of the conference to raise its game and get better. Stanford used to waltz to Pac-12 titles. Now the league has gotten so much deeper and better. Stanford did win the Pac-12 this season, but we’re no longer living in a world where it’s an automatic Stanford coronation each year. Not seeing Stanford and Tara try to fend off the rest of the Pac-12 in 2025 and beyond will be a real disappointment, one of the many things we will miss about the death of Pac-12 women’s basketball.
Wouldn’t it be great to see JuJu Watkins return to the Pac-12 and get another season or two against Oregon State’s elite defense, Utah’s problematic matchups, Colorado’s formidable lineup, and Arizona’s strong fundamentals? We won’t see JuJu evolve against those teams. They will be in other conferences. The galaxy of stars in the Pac-12 will be scattered next year, and so we won’t see JuJu being able to measure her growth relative to the same set of schools she faced this season.
The Pac-12 Women’s Basketball Tournament saying goodbye this year — and not existing in 2025 — is a real letdown. At the Pac-12 Women’s Tournament, very good teams play each other in the quarterfinals, and great teams play each other in the semifinals and final. There are so many quality matchups in store for us this week, a true basketball buffet. Not having this large platter of elite games to watch in 2025 and beyond leaves Pac-12 lifers with a real empty feeling.
There is only one good thing about the Pac-12 — and Pac-12 women’s basketball — dying: Next season, all these teams (except for Oregon State and Washington State) get more national visibility by no longer being on Pac-12 Network. It’s hard to overstate just how much JuJu Watkins and Tara VanDerveer, among others, have not received adquate national recognition or coverage due to being black-holed on Pac-12 Network. Next year, JuJu Watkins will be on Big Ten Network and Fox Sports a lot more. Tara and Stanford will be on ACC Network and ESPN a lot more. This is the one really good thing about the Pac-12 dying … but everything else about the death of Pac-12 women’s basketball is deeply sad.