Tag: USC pac-12 Network

USC vs Nevada likely to be Trojans’ last football game on Pac-12 Network

#USC fans are planning to celebrate the end of Pac-12 Network. That’s the big milestone attached to the Nevada game.

We know this for sure: Saturday’s USC football home game against the Nevada Wolf Pack will be the Trojans’ last home game ever shown on Pac-12 Network. We don’t yet know as an absolute certainty that it’s the last USC football game to be on Pac-12 Network, but it’s more likely than not. This probably will be the last time any USC fan will have to endure Pac-12 Network’s limited visibility and accessibility.

We want to be very clear: The problem with the network is the lack of distribution and accessibility. The actual on-air product of Pac-12 Network is and has been very good.

We wrote:

“One of the especially sad dimensions of the Pac-12 Network story is that the product itself — what you saw on the screen, getting beamed into your home, if you did have access to the P-12 Net — was really very good.

“The problem with Pac-12 Network was never the production quality of a game or studio broadcast. All the people who were responsible for putting a good product on the air did an absolutely fantastic job. The network’s daily work gained industry respect.”

It’s important to make that clear.

Having done that, we turn to the reality that this will be USC’s final home football game on Pac-12 Network. USC fans will be throwing a party to celebrate this occasion. No, really: Tim Prangley, co-host of Trojan Conquest Live and part of the USC postgame show at The Voice of College Football, told us earlier this summer he would be marking the occasion at the Nevada game. It’s a goodbye bash for USC’s liberation from this national burden which has limited the program’s exposure.

See how other USC fans are reacting to the end of the Pac-12 Network reign of error, which is in many ways one more step out of the shadows created by Larry Scott and the Pac-12 CEO Group:

USC goes on Pac-12 Network this weekend while small schools are on ESPN

Want to watch #USC this weekend? You have to have Pac-12 Network. Want to watch UMass? Turn on ESPN. This is so dumb.

It is bad that the Pac-12 has died. USC playing Oregon, Washington and Utah is fun and interesting. So many of us who are fans of USC and fans of college football grew up with these West Coast rivalries and the familiar regional matchups against particular opponents.

Going to Corvallis to play Oregon State is regularly a challenge for USC.

Going to Seattle to play the Washington Huskies often felt like a main event for the Trojans going back to the late 1970s against Don James’ teams.

USC’s comeback win over Arizona State in 2005 is one of the most memorable games of the Pete Carroll era.

USC’s close win over Stanford in 2004 kept that perfect season alive.

We’re going to miss the Pac-12 in terms of the football memories and the Saturday nights against schools who might have hated the Trojans, but certainly enjoyed the challenge of playing USC as a fellow Western institution. We didn’t wish the Pac-12 died, but we — as USC bloggers at Trojans Wire — have expressed solidarity with USC fans who saw how amateurish and unprofessional the Pac-12 CEO Group was. Decisions were made that did not serve USC’s and the conference’s best interests, as everyone else in America now understands on a deeper level.

We all wished the Pac-12 made good decisions, but it didn’t. That’s why USC and its fans wanted to leave for the Big Ten.

In this final Pac-12 football season, USC fans can remind everyone else how bad this conference’s leadership truly was over the past several years. Just look at the Week 0 football schedule as a example: