Jim Moore: The death of the Pac-12 is one more sign that college football is a joke

I grew up and grew old with the Pac-12 so I guess I should reminisce and feel nostalgic about my far-and-away favorite conference disappearing in 2024.

I’ll do that in time, but right now there’s a lot of head shaking and bitterness in my house along with a drastically reduced amount of Jack Daniel’s in a half-gallon bottle in my liquor cabinet.

I want to say “oh well, it was a good run,” recognizing that I’ve spent around 60 years watching Pac-8, Pac-10 and Pac-12 sports. Originally a fan of Sonny Sixkiller and the Huskies, I saw the bright light from God’s Country that beckoned me to the Palouse in 1974 and have been a Coug fan ever since.

With Friday’s news that Oregon and Washington are joining the Big Ten and Arizona, Arizona State and Utah are joining the Big 12, just like that, the Pac-12 became the Pac-4.

Why? Money, it’s always about the money, never about anything else, and it’s something I’ve never understood. This might be a horrible comparison, but what the heck, I’ll make it anyway. I’ve worked 32 years as a sportswriter and 12 years as a sports talk show host. For 41 of those years, I’ve had a five-figure salary.

But every time I thought about pursuing a six-figure salary, I quickly ruled it out because I loved my job and the perks that came with it. I might have to move, might have to dress up every day, might have to carry a briefcase, might have to work 60-hour weeks, etc.

I wonder if the cash-chasing defectors from the Pac-12 will have regrets when they’re at 30,000 feet in the middle of a 12-hour odyssey, changing planes in Denver on their way home from a game at Penn State.

Pat Forde of SI.com is similarly skeptical, writing: “When November comes and the L.A. teams are playing under leaden skies in Piscataway, N.J., and State College, Pa., and West Lafayette, Ind., and Champaign, Ill., maybe they can light the sideline heaters with $100 bills from the league revenue deposits…

“And when Oregon and Washington athletes wind up taking proctored midterms in a conference room at a hotel in College Park before a game against Maryland, be sure to thank the school presidents for those blessed educational opportunities.”

I’m much more aligned with Oregon State athletic director Scott Barnes, who told The Oregonian he was furious, adding: “Conference realignment doesn’t make sense anymore. What this enterprise was built on was regionality and rivalries. That is gone, that is leaving the Pac-12…those things are forgotten.”

All of this upheaval has somehow turned me into a Sun Devils fan because of comments from Arizona State president Michael Crow, who said: “A number of us, including me, were strongly committed to the Pac-12 Conference as a thing…We were the stalwarts that were fighting for the Pac-12 to the last ditch.”

Crow also won me over with his description of Apple’s all-streaming offer to the Pac-12, calling it a “technological 23rd century Star Trek thing.”

I appreciate that instead of using big words with a lot of syllables like most guys with his IQ, he used “thing” twice, and he gets bonus points for sounding like those of us who don’t know where this streaming stuff is headed, but we assume it’s a good “thing” so we’ll just roll with it.

I shouldn’t have such a carefree attitude about the Pac-12’s demise, but my full-blown interest in college football started to wane when players opted out of bowl games and continued with the transfer portal and really lost me when Name, Image and Likeness was introduced and quickly abused. If the next step is eliminating gambling on the games, I’ll be out on college football completely.

In the meantime, I’m curious about the future of the Pac-4 and will of course continue to root for the Cougs, but I’ll also root like mad for the other leftovers - Oregon State, Stanford and Cal. I’ve seen the speculation that all four or two of these schools will join the Mountain West Conference. I’d be fine with that. Or maybe the Pac-4 will add four schools and become a Pac-8 again like they were in the 1960’s and 70’s.

But there’s a part of me that would really enjoy the Pac-4 staying as is, us against the college football world and screw everyone else. We’ll sign a reduced deal with Apple and cultivate a grassroots following that will cause subscriptions to go through the roof and exceed what those defectors are getting from their so-called super conferences. Our cash cow will become a fatter cow than the fattest cow on the Big Ten farm.

We’ll play a three-game series with each school in the Pac-4 and three non-conference games to flesh out our 12-game schedule. And we’ll hold our conference championship game, featuring our top two teams, in Las Vegas in early December. Would anyone be interested in seeing those two teams play each other for a fourth time in one season? Probably not but so what, we’d all be drinking and gambling and having a great time in Vegas!

I’m sorry, but this whole damn thing’s a joke, and I’m not referring to the Pac-4 but college football in general. Washington State and Oregon State fans are so upset that in two separate polls, they voted to discontinue the Apple Cup and Civil War battles between the Cougs and Huskies and Ducks and Beavers even though UW and Oregon administrators said they want to keep the in-state rivalries going.

It’s too bad on many levels but especially since the final Pac-12 season promises to be one of its best with so many teams ranked in the top 25 and so many terrific quarterbacks on display every week.

I’m looking forward to those matchups and admit to being more excited about seeing the hostile environments at Pac-4 stadiums when the defectors come to town. Pac-4-letter venom from fans is absolutely guaranteed.

As for how everything shakes out in the future, who knows? And for me anyway, it’s also turned into a who cares?

Jim Moore has covered Washington’s sports scene from every angle for multiple news outlets. You can find him on Twitter @cougsgo, and on KJR-FM 93.3, where he co-hosts a sports talk show from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on weekdays.