Demise of the Pac-12 and Other Off-Season Events

Warren Grimes

For women’s hoops fans, it’s been an interesting summer – not to mention the spring that preceded it. 

We learned at season’s end that the two top-ranked recruits from last year’s freshman class were transferring.  Lauren Betts, the #1 ranked high school recruit from last year, decided she preferred to play at UCLA.  Indya Nivar, another top 20 recruit, wanted to play closer to home in North Carolina.  On top of that, rising senior Agnes Emma-Nnopu opted to transfer to Texas. 

If there was a positive to be found anywhere in the off-season events, it was that Talana Lepolo, well behind Betts and Nivar in high school ranking, had become Stanford’s starting point guard and started for the U19 USA team that won the championship this summer.  Oh, and Cameron Brink – yes thank goodness for Brink – was the MVP of the champion USA team in the three-on-three WBB world competition in Vienna.

But in terms of what’s happened lately, it’s all about the disintegration of the Pac-12 conference.  After USC and UCLA announced their intention to join the Big Ten last year, the future of the conference was uncertain at best.  It’s worth noting, however, that even without UCLA and USC, the conference still could have been the best women’s hoops conference in the country.  

Three-time NCAA champion Stanford, with the winningest coach in BB history, was still there.  So was Arizona, which played in the NCAA championship game against Stanford in 2021.  Oregon could have won it all in 2020 if the NCAA tournament hadn’t been cancelled.  Then there was Utah, which shared the conference title with Stanford in 2023.  And not so lowly WSU, which pulled the most startling upset by winning the conference tournament last March (WSU still hasn’t bested Stanford in women’s hoops).  And that leaves out Colorado, which has become a no-nonsense team capable of beating Stanford and anyone else in the conference. 

So why take apart the best women’s hoops conference in the country? 

Well, the demise of the Conference had absolutely nothing to do with women’s hoops. 

It was all about money, money, money, and that money came primarily from football.  Each school that has chosen to leave the Pac-12, and that includes eight of the twelve members, has done so for a selfish reason – to maximize its television revenues.  In doing so, the schools showed little or no concern for the remaining conference members.  Nor have they paid much attention to women’s basketball or to any of the other non-football sports.  My hunch is that none of the eight women’s hoops coaches from the departing schools, while they will make the best of their opportunities, would have found this decision to be in the best interests of their program. 

So, the remains of the “Pac-4 Conference” are Stanford, California, OSU, and WSU.  The athletic directors at these schools can understandably ask: “what did we do wrong?” 

I cannot predict what will happen next.  A four-school conference is untenable, although the schools could agree to continue to cooperate in the short term, or even attempt a collective negotiation that would allow all four to join another conference.  The school with the most leverage may be Stanford, in part because of its storied record in many sports (winning the Director’s Cup consistently).  Stanford and California also have leverage because of their location in a populous Bay Area media market. 

Rather than try to predict, let me end by just suggesting what kind of a solution would be best--best for Stanford, but also best for the other three schools and college athletics generally.   That would be to separate football from the other sports.  As the UCLA football coach has suggested in an LA Times interview, there could be further consolidation of football conferences, perhaps even to the point of having a single national conference for football (with various regional divisions).  That conference could then negotiate lucrative media coverage contracts.  Other sports could be left to organize in smaller regionally based conferences (bring back a Pac-8 of the four schools in Washington, Oregon, and California?).  They could still sell media rights and bring in revenue, but money would no longer dominate decisions about what is in the best interests of the athletes and fans.