Tag: Pac-12 Conference

First four-team playoff and last four-team playoff both had Big Ten vs Pac-12 for the national title

2014 season: Ohio State-Oregon championship game. 2023 season: Michigan-Washington. How about that?

Time is a flat circle. Have you heard that saying before?

Well, it’s true. In the 2014 season, when the four-team College Football Playoff began, it was Ohio State and Oregon facing off in the national championship game in January of 2015. The Cardale Jones-Ezekiel Elliott duo led the Buckeyes past Marcus Mariota and the Ducks in the national title game.

Now, with the final four-team playoff field reduced to two teams, it is another Big Ten matchup with the Pac-12: Washington against Michigan for the title.

Ohio State had plenty of NFL talent in that 2015 national championship game: Curtis Samuel, Michael Thomas, Eli Apple, and the others mentioned previously. Oregon had Mariota and Royce Freeman, but the Buckeyes got the win.

This time, both Michigan and Washinton are loaded with future NFL players, plus a head coach in Jim Harbaugh who is a popular pick to go to the NFL once this season comes to an end.

Nearly a decade later, and in the final four-team College Football Playoff field, the Pac-12 and Big Ten face off again.

Time is a flat circle, and the SEC is actually going to watch the title game without anyone in the hunt, as was the case nine years ago.

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Battle of mid: Cal faces Texas Tech in Independence Bowl meeting of 6-6 programs

Cal got to a bowl game, which is surprising enough in its own right. Can the Bears now beat Texas Tech?

The second Pac-12 bowl game on the slate is just a couple of hours after the UCLA-Boise State L.A. Bowl kicks off on Saturday.

This bowl is Cal against Texas Tech in the Independence Bowl. Both programs finished with 6-6 records, but Justin Wilcox leading this Golden Bear team to a bowl game is quite surprising. It took a 33-7 blowout of UCLA in the final week for the Bears to become bowl-eligible.

Cal was 3-6 at one point and won three straight against Washington State, Stanford, and UCLA to close things out. The win over the Cougars was their biggest of the season, a 42-39 final.

Running back Jaydn Ott was the star of the show again for Cal this season, rushing for 1,261 yards with 11 scores and averaging 114 yards per game.

Texas Tech was 3-5 entering its 2023 off week. The Red Raiders won three of the last four games to become bowl-eligible, with the one loss coming to Texas on the road in a 57-7 blowout against the Big 12 champions.

Running back Tahj Brooks had 1,443 yards with nine scores. He recently announced his decision to return for one more year in a huge boost for the Red Raiders.

Behren Morton threw for 1,498 yards with 12 touchdowns and seven interceptions for Texas Tech. He threw five interceptions combined over the final three games, so that could be an issue for Tech.

The Red Raiders are slight favorites in this game, but Justin Wilcox winning a bowl game at Cal should be more than enough to keep him around in Berkeley for one more year as the Golden Bears head for the ACC.

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UCLA faces Boise State in the first Pac-12 bowl game of the last Pac-12 season

Can Chip Kelly further undermine his status at UCLA?

The L.A. Bowl is one of the newer bowl games. The contest is played in Los Angeles at SoFi Stadium. Last year, Fresno State defeated Cam Ward and Washington State.

This season, the UCLA Bruins, who decided to retain Chip Kelly and then saw Dante Moore hit the portal, face Boise State. The Broncos also made some changes this year. After firing Andy Avalos, they named Spencer Danielson as the permanent head coach. Danielson was the interim following Avalos’s departure. Eric McAllister and Taylen Green were some big names to enter the portal, so their roster looks different, as is the case for UCLA.

The Bruins are 7-5 and the Broncos are 8-5. Boise State won the Mountain West title, taking the championship game over UNLV. Despite firing Avalos midseason, Boise State went from a 3-4 record to a conference title. BSU won five of its last six games with the one loss coming to Fresno State on the road.

The Bruins’ decision to retain Chip Kelly was a bit of a surprise, especially with the move to the Big Ten Conference coming. They lost three of their last four games, scoring just 17 total points against Arizona (10) and Arizona State (7) combined. UCLA also served up a 33-7 stinker against Cal to end the year. 

Boise State is without Green, its starting QB, and a number of other players, so it makes sense why the Bruins are favored, not to mention they have home-city advantage in this one.

A loss for UCLA would certainly stir the Chip Kelly pot once again despite the fact that the Bruins retained him for the 2024 campaign.

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In final year, Pac-12 Conference named one of biggest winners of 2023 season

The Pac-12 Conference has been named one of the biggest winners of the 2023 college football season.

We entered the 2023 college football season knowing that it would be the last for the Pac-12 Conference, a historic league that spanned for over a century and gave us some great memories during that time. We now leave the 2023 season with the Pac-12 being named as one of the biggest winners of the season, thanks to a fantastic year from some of the top teams out west.

The Washington Huskies area headed to the College Football Playoff after a perfect 13-0 season, while the Oregon Ducks and Arizona Wildcats finished the year as two of the top teams in the nation, going to highly respected bowl games. We also had schools like Colorado and USC making headlines for a number of reasons throughout the season, capturing national headlines throughout the year.

Because of all of this, CBS Sports named the Pac-12 as one of their biggest winners when taking stock of the season:

It’s a deep injustice that the Pac-12 is crumbling, but the conference gave us a swan song for the ages. The league championship was a legitimate CFP play-in game between Oregon and Washington. Four Pac-12 teams finished ranked in the CFP top 20, and four others had at least a stint in the polls. Arizona was one of the surprise teams in the sport, overcoming a bad loss against Mississippi State to finish in the top 15, a masterful performance from Jedd Fisch’s squad. Two of the four Heisman Trophy finalists hail from the conference. Colorado brought crazy attention in the first year of the Deion Sanders era, posting several of the most-watched games in the sport. This was not only the best year of Pac-12 football in quite some time, it was the must-watch conference in college football in 2023.

Going forward, the teams from the Pac-12 will go their separate ways, with Oregon, Washington, USC, and UCLA all headed to the Big Ten, while Arizona, Arizona State, Utah and Colorado join the Big 12, and California and Stanford head to the ACC.

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Isaiah Collier needs to start performing up to Pac-12 Player of the Year standards

Isaiah Collier needs to answer the challenge.

At the start of the college basketball season, Trojans Wire and Ducks Wire shared our picks for Pac-12 Player of the Year.

Here they are:

Matt Zemek: Isaiah Collier, USC

Zachary Neel: Isaiah Collier, USC

Matt Wadleigh: Isaiah Collier, USC

Don Smalley: N’Faly Dante, Oregon

A lot of analysts and pundits felt Isaiah Collier would be the best basketball player in the Pac-12 this season. Against Kansas State, he was that kind of player. He dominated a good team. Since then, we haven’t seen that same kind of player, particularly not against Oklahoma this past Friday in a tough two-point loss for the Trojans.

USC’s revival this season depends on a lot of things, including the team getting healthier and accumulating more practice time together. Vince Iwuchukwu needs to get his sea legs under him and round into form as a high-impact big man at both ends of the floor. Bronny James needs to get healthy and give USC wing shooting and backcourt depth.

However, while other players get healthy, Isaiah Collier needs to be able to dominate games. If he can’t USC’s season will fall well short of where the team hoped it would be.

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Notre Dame fans could not believe their last 2023 football game was on Pac-12 Network

This went as well as you might expect for Notre Dame football fans … which is to say, it went horribly.

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish, the most famous football program in the United States, ended their 2023 season not on NBC or ABC or Fox, but on Pac-12 Network. We knew this game was going to be on Pac-12 Network, but a lot of casual fans did not. On this Thanksgiving weekend, they were probably visiting family and wanted to settle in on a Saturday and watch their Irish play Stanford. Boy, were they in for a surprise.

Notre Dame fans had to madly scramble for any outlet through which to gain access to Pac-12 Network. They learned about FuboTV. They might have had to go to a sports bar. Some of them, as you will see below, had to just bite the bullet and listen to a Notre Dame radio broadcast.

Just like the 1940s!

The reactions are pure comedy gold, and you can see for yourself:

Stanford basketball continues to struggle under hot-seat head coach Jerod Haase

The clock is ticking for a Pac-12 coach who is squarely on the hot seat.

We asked our Pac-12 basketball panel about the coaches who will likely be fired at the end of the season.

Matt Zemek: Jerod Haase at Stanford and Mike Hopkins at Washington.

Zachary Neel: I think you see Mike Hopkins out at Washington.

Matt Wadleigh: I have Mike Hopkins being fired.

Don Smalley: Hopkins (Washington), Wayne Tinkle (Oregon State).

So far this season, Jerod Haase has done little to suggest that he will retain his job for one more season. Haase and Stanford had a quality win opportunity on Wednesday night against Arkansas in the Battle 4 Atlantis tournament in The Bahamas. Arkansas played a terrible game, shooting poorly and failing to generate good offense. While Stanford’s defense had something to do with that, the Cardinal were hardly on top of their game.

One Stanford player, Spencer Jones, was outstanding against Arkansas. Jones scored 27 points on 10-of-20 shooting, 5 of 10 on 3-pointers. If you take away Jones’ shooting numbers, Stanford shot under 36 percent from the field and only 20 percent from 3-point range. The Cardinal gave up 19 turnovers, too. They weren’t good. Yet, Arkansas shot just 30 percent from the field and made only 4 of 19 3-pointers.

The game was there for the taking. Stanford couldn’t take it. The Cardinal already lost at home to Santa Clara and need high-end wins to create an NCAA Tournament resume to save Haase’s job. Haase has been coaching Stanford since 2016, and he still doesn’t have a single NCAA Tournament. He has won one postseason game, an NIT first-round game. That’s it.

In seven-plus seasons.

If he doesn’t make the NCAAs this season, that has to be it for him.

Stanford faces Michigan on Thanksgiving Day in the Battle 4 Atlantis. A loss there would cement Stanford’s position as a team going nowhere. If the quality wins don’t emerge soon, Haase’s bizarrely long tenure at Stanford will finally come to an end.

Visit our friends at Fighting Irish Wire, Buffaloes Wire, and Ducks Wire.

Pac-12 football game predictions for Week 12

Pickin’ the Pac is back for USC-UCLA and Washington-Oregon State.

The Pac-12 Conference regular season is coming to an end, although the future of the Pac-12 looks like it will be the Pac-2. This is in reference to the latest news regarding Washington State and Oregon State.

This weekend, Oregon State-Washington is the biggest game, and UCLA-USC could be the final game of Chip Kelly’s time in Westwood. Besides that, not much else is noteworthy, although nobody saw Arizona State stunning UCLA last weekend.

Once again, Matt Zemek, Donovan James, and Matt Wadleigh of Trojans Wire — joined by Don Smalley, Zach Neel, and Miles Dwyer of Ducks Wire, and Jack Carlough of Buffaloes Wire — are here to make their predictions for another loaded slate of games.

Oregon State and Washington State should call Michigan, Florida State about joining Pac-12

You can’t have a Pac-12 with Michigan and Florida State? Wait a minute. Stanford and Cal are in the ACC. The Big Ten has USC.

You might have heard earlier this week that Washington State and Oregon State won a court ruling that enables the two schools to be the only current board members of the Pac-12 Conference.

The so-called “2-Pac” is moving closer to having control of the Pac-12’s funds, though an appeals process and more court hearings will occur before the Cougars and Beavers can get their hands on that money and save their athletic departments. There’s a long way to go before any of this is fully resolved.

Meanwhile, Michigan is not happy with Big Ten leadership over the conference’s handling of the Jim Harbaugh-Connor Stalions situation. Florida State, Miami and Clemson still want out of the ACC. Other schools would like to leave their current arrangements for another conference if they could.

It brings up a point for Washington State and Oregon State to consider: At least make a call to Michigan, Florida State and other schools unhappy with their current conferences. What do the Cougars and Beavers have to lose?

There’s a fresh round of realignment speculation, and that’s worth discussing below as you read what other people are saying about Wazzu and Oregon State:

Oregon State and Washington State win court ruling, setting up more Pac-12 chaos

This is absolutely wild, but it’s par for the course in the Pac-12. The death of a conference could not be more dramatic.

The 2-Pac just won. The Pac-10 just lost. The Pac-12’s death — and how that will be resolved — continues to be one of the strangest dramas we have ever seen in college sports.

Jon Wilner of the Wilner Hotline offered this basic summary of what happened and what it means:

“After a two-and-a-half-hour hearing, Whitman County (Wash.) Superior Court Judge Gary Libey granted the schools’ request for a preliminary injunction that confirms they are the only remaining voting members of the shattered conference.

“The Pac-12 ‘will be governed by the two universities that have not submitted their notices of intent to withdraw,’ Libey said.

“However, Libey stayed his ruling until the end of the week as the defendant, Washington (acting on behalf of all 10 departing members), seeks an appeal from the Washington Supreme Court in Olympia.

“But the ruling Tuesday evening begins to clear the way for WSU and OSU to control more than $400 million in revenue for the current fiscal year and whatever long-term assets the conference maintains following the departure of 10 schools next summer.”

Oregon State and Washington State are in position to potentially recover a lot of lost revenue, but the court battles are far from over.

Reactions came in fast and furious, as you will see below: