The Pac-12 Network is riding into the sunset. As the Pac-12 era comes to a close with the end of the Pac-12 Baseball Tournament — marking the final live sports event for the conference before it folds up shop and essentially becomes a zombie conference inhabited by only two schools (Washington State and Oregon State) — the Pac-12 Network ceases to be a meaningful presence on the college sports landscape. It’s true that the Pac-12 Network will still exist, helping to produce the home football games for Washington State and Oregon State which will air on the CW Network later this year, but this is the end of the line in terms of a college sports cycle in which Pac-12 Network covers a full platter of football, basketball, and baseball games from Labor Day weekend through Memorial Day weekend. That’s over. That’s done.
Friday night’s Pac-12 Baseball Tournament semifinal between Stanford and Arizona was and is and will be the last live sporting event to air on Pac-12 Network. Play-by-play man Roxy Bernstein signed off for the last time. It was poignant. We remind you — and ourselves — that the people who produce Pac-12 sporting events and create the product on the ground have done a terrific job and deserve our thanks and appreciation. The problem with the Pac-12 Network — the reason it was a focus of so much anger and frustration — had nothing to do with the people in the broadcast booth or in the production trucks behind the scenes. The problem was always the lack of distribution and accessibility, which went straight to Larry Scott and the Pac-12 CEO Group. One last time, it was never about the on-air talent or the hard-working people who put together a well-produced broadcast.
Here’s how the last Pac-12 Network live-game broadcast ended: