Tag: Pac-12 Conference

Former Colorado athletic director Mike Bohn steps down at USC

BREAKING: Mike Bohn has resigned as USC’s athletic director

Nearly four years after he was hired in 2019, Mike Bohn has resigned from his position as USC’s athletic director, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In a statement made to the LA Times, the 62-year-old Bohn mentioned both health challenges and a desire to be more present with his family moving forward.

The unexpected news broke early Friday afternoon.

Bohn, a Boulder High School graduate, was Colorado’s AD from 2005-13, guiding the Buffs from the Big 12 to the Pac-12 late in his tenure. He has also held athletic director positions at Cincinnati, San Diego State and Idaho.

Just last summer, Bohn helped secure USC an invite to the Big Ten, which the Trojans will officially join in 2024. Bohn was also responsible for hiring current USC head football coach Lincoln Riley in November of 2021.

“After more than 40 years of college athletics leadership, it is the right time to step away from my position as Director of Athletics at the University of Southern California,” Bohn wrote in a statement to the LA Times. “I have dedicated my life to serving student-athletes and advancing the enterprise of intercollegiate athletics. I will always be proud of leading the program out of the most tumultuous times in the history of the profession and at USC with a restored reputation and national milestone accomplishments.”

For more on Bohn’s resignation, check out Trojans Wire.

Contact/Follow us @BuffaloesWire on Twitter, and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Colorado news, notes and opinions.

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Pac-12 Conference to add in-game features to football broadcasts

One wonders if this would have changed #USC’s mind about leaving for the Big Ten if it had been done several years ago.

Better late than never? Maybe … but not for USC and UCLA. The Pac-12 Connference announced that it will be adding various in-game components and features to its football broadcasts. More access to coaches and players is the general overall theme and priority attached to this development. The Pac-12 obviously wants to make its television product more interesting and compelling, part of the push to increase the value of its inventory to potential media rights partners.

One is left to wonder if this move would have made USC and UCLA stop and reconsider the decision to leave for the Big Ten if it had been approved in 2017 or 2018, not this year. Could the Pac-12, under Larry Scott, have done things to head off a potential USC exit? People will debate this, but the questions will linger.

Let’s look at the specific things the Pac-12 will do in football:

How do Pac-12 QBs stack up against the rest of the country?

Caleb Williams is clearly the best QB in college football, but where would you place Bo Nix, for example? Get more from @College_Wire

Some sports discussions and assessments are not difficult to carry out. For example: Caleb Williams is the best quarterback in the Pac-12 and college football. Would anyone seriously doubt that claim? He’s the runaway favorite to be the No. 1 pick in the 2024 NFL draft. He is viewed as a player worth tanking for, a player worth moving all the chips into the middle of the poker table to acquire.

After that, however, where do the various other Pac-12 quarterbacks land in a larger rankings-based evaluation of the nation’s top signal-callers? Pretty interesting question, right?

Here’s Patrick Conn of College Sports Wire, who goes deeper into this discussion with his rankings of the top college football quarterbacks heading into the 2023 season. Let’s put a spotlight on the Pac-12’s best gunslingers and see where they stand:

Pac-12 football: the must-see games for 2023

.@College_Wire offers a guide to the biggest games of 2023, including the #Pac12 showdowns you won’t want to miss.

In the middle of may, college football fans look at the upcoming season schedules and plot out the likely wins, the probable losses, and the toss-up games they circle in red as the true keys to the season.

A football schedule is marvelous in its simplicity and accessibility. Even before the internet arrived in the 1990s, college football fans knew which 11 teams (now 12 — the season expanded from 11 to 12 games nearly 20 years ago) their team and other competitors would play. Fans didn’t have to Google search for this information.

Fans have been examining college football schedules in late spring and early summer for generations. With USC entering its last Pac-12 football season before moving to the Big Ten, there’s an extra-poignant feel to this 2023 journey. Each Pac-12 clash for USC will carry a little extra weight.

Patrick Conn of College Sports Wire looks at big Pac-12 games along with other must-see games for the 2023 college football season.

Pac-12 baseball standings: May 16

#USC prepares for a huge series vs the Arizona Wildcats as the #Pac12 baseball season winds down. Get the full standings here:

The college football and college basketball seasons are in a bit of a dry season, so college baseball is at the forefront. The College World Series is approaching, and the Pac-12 Conference is top-heavy.

Stanford and Oregon State are both ranked in the top 25, and Washington, USC, Arizona State, and Oregon all have decent records. Here is the latest edition of the Pac-12 baseball standings with two weeks left in the month of May.

The Cardinal remain at the top and are ranked fifth in the entire nation, so they will be a tough out for anybody over the next few weeks.

What is a ‘dangerous team’ in college football? Experts weigh in

Is #USC a dangerous team or just a really good team? Does it matter? At any rate, it’s a fun offseason conversation.

What is a “dangerous” college football team? One could say Alabama and Georgia and Michigan are. Going against them seems pretty threatening in the immediate sense of being likely to lose. Yet, for a lot of us who follow sports — not just college football — the specific notion of being “dangerous” often suggests or implies being less than fully elite, but being capable of rising to the top if everything comes together. That might be, for a lot of people, the true essence of what it means to be “dangerous” as a sports team or competitor. The potential hasn’t been fully actualized, but it’s there, and it could bust out in a big way.

Let’s see what 247Sports has to say about the dangerous teams in 2023, and if USC football is part of the mix.

(h/t Brad Crawford of 247 Sports)

Five Pac-12 teams land in ESPN’s post-spring power rankings

It is widely agreed upon that five teams have a shot at the #Pac12 title. See how ESPN ranked them after spring ball:

Spring football is behind us, and now it is a long few months until Week 0 of the college football season. The Pac-12 Conference is about to begin the final season with USC and UCLA before they move to the Big Ten.

The USC Trojans have a ton of talent and promise, as do a lot of other Pac-12 programs.

Mark Schlabach of ESPN dropped his post-spring top 25, and there are a number of Pac-12 teams that made the list with the Trojans on top of the conference.

Here’s a rundown of the teams in the Pac-12 and their rankings on the list:

5 Pac-12 football burning questions after spring ball

Spring games and spring practices have run their course. Where do #USC and other #Pac12 contenders stand right now?

Now that spring practices and spring games have concluded across the Pac-12, have we learned anything new about the football landscape in the conference? Has anything meaningfully changed?

Raymond Lucas Jr. of 247 Sports put together a look at the most important questions to ask about several teams in the Pac-12 Conference.

Next year, USC will be in the Big Ten, and the Trojans will have a fresh set of concerns about their competition, which will include, Michigan, Ohio State, and Wisconsin.

For 2023, however, the Trojans will spend one more year — and autumn — focused on Oregon, Washington, Utah, and Oregon State. Let’s see where the bigger questions come from in the world of Pac-12 football following spring practices:

2024 NFL draft Pac-12 prospects — a lot more than just Caleb Williams

The 2024 #NFLDraft class will be #USC’s last Pac-12 draft class. That’s a sign of how quickly USC’s Pac-12 existence is winding down. The new era is near.

The end of the 2023 NFL draft makes it reasonable to turn our focus to the 2024 NFL draft. The USC Trojans are likely to produce the top pick in the draft, Caleb Williams, but that’s just a small piece of the larger significance of this draft for the Pac-12 Conference.

We have to get used to the new reality in college sports. This next football season is the last one in which USC will be a member of the Pac-12. This means next year’s draft class will be USC’s last Pac-12 football draft class. At the 2025 NFL draft, USC’s draft haul will be part of the Big Ten’s draft numbers, even though players were recruited when the Trojans were still a Pac-12 member.

Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News offered a first list of elite 2024 NFL draft prospects from the Pac-12.

You’re up, Caleb, but let’s then see who comes after him:

Three Pac-12 schools fail to produce an NFL draft pick

Two of these three Pac-12 schools make sense. The other one is a real plot twist, and a sign of a team bringing its best players back for 2023.

The USC Trojans saw three players get drafted this past weekend, two of them going to the Minnesota Vikings. The Pac-12 Conference, as a whole, saw a lot of players get drafted, including Dorian Thompson-Robinson being selected by the Cleveland Browns.

Just seven Power Five programs went the entire weekend without an NFL draft pick. Surprisingly, three of those were from the Pac-12: Arizona, Colorado, and Washington, per Bryan Fischer of Fox. The other four were Duke, Kansas, Indiana, and Vanderbilt.

Arizona isn’t entirely surprising, and the Colorado Buffaloes went 1-11 and didn’t have much talent, although that is changing with Deion Sanders on board as the head coach.

The Washington Huskies had a strong year, but their best player, Michael Penix Jr., returned for one more season.

The Pac-12 Conference ios looking pretty stacked in football, and the Buffs and Huskies should see at least one player hear his name called during the 2024 NFL draft.

As it turns out, this is the final year in which USC and UCLA are in the Pac-12, and there is still no word on which schools will take their spots, though San Diego State and SMU are strong contenders.

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