Maybe the Pac-4 schools will merge with the Mountain West and very technically preserve the Pac-12. Yet, we all know the Pac-12 as we have lived through it — as we have experienced it — is dead.
No more Arizona-UCLA basketball as a conference game with championship stakes. Maybe the two schools will play nonconference games, but it won’t feel the same.
No more Oregon-Stanford football games as a conference game with the Ducks trying to avoid a crucial loss in the Pac-12 standings.
No more Washington road trips to Tempe, trying to solve the mystery of Arizona State, a place where the Huskies have not won a football game since 2001. These and other Pac-12 (formerly Pac-10) games were part of our lives here in the West, and next year, they’ll be gone. Schools will surely schedule nonconference games, but that won’t feel remotely the same.
It’s time for a Pac-12 goodbye tour — not just for us at USC (which we were planning for), but for at least eight schools. If Stanford and Cal go to the ACC, and Oregon State and Washington State get absorbed into the Big 12, that’s it for everyone (officially).
As Andrea Bocelli has said — and sung — “time to say goodbye.” We didn’t want this, but it’s what we have to do. It is indeed time for the Pac-12 farewell tour, which begins now and continues throughout the college football and college basketball seasons here at Trojans Wire.
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