Realignment keeps getting dumber

The Pac-12 cycle of abuse continues

Credit: Pac-12

Yes, it all seems crazy. But can you blame the Pac-12? Think about what that conference — or the shattered remnants of what used to be a conference, now two teams and a few people in an empty office building in San Ramon, Calif. — have been through.

In the matter of one summer, a proud and previously stable organization comprised primarily of huge state universities with a century of shared competitive tradition was ripped apart by people in Irving, Tex. and Rosemont, Ill. and Bristol, Conn. and whichever conference room the relevant Fox executives were working out of that week. None of the league’s decades of coherent existence mattered. None of the geographic or cultural considerations or the jobs of the people employed by the Pac-12 Networks held an ounce of sway. The Pac-12 was the victim of a ruthless calculus. For straightforward financial reasons, other conferences wanted what the Pac-12 had, and so they took it.

Force begets force. The last few holdouts are hardened. They learned two lessons: We have to do what we have to do — and none of it has to make sense. If Washington and Oregon and USC and UCLA can join the Big Ten, then the Pac-12’s next step doesn’t have to look normal or sane or recognizable to anyone who has enjoyed college athletics for most of their lives. It need only enrich the hollow but still extant trademark known as the Pac-12. Make it more marketable. Secure its future. Find some TV money. Nothing else matters.

Which is how you get to the last few days — when conference realignment, already so senseless in so many directions, found a way to get even dumber.

Full disclosure: At first, this was going to be a post about Gonzaga, and specifically about Gonzaga’s reported entrance to the New Pac-12, news of which was first reported by Action Network’s Brett McMurphy Monday afternoon. It was a huge deal for college basketball, at least in theory, and an existential situation for the West Coast Conference. There is the state of the WCC to worry about, of course; there is also a retrospective to be written about the long unstoppable rise of Gonzaga basketball, about how this tiny and once financially challenged school got hot in hoops, became the Cinderella that never left, and transformed itself across three decades from lovable underdog to mid-major stalwart to elite annual powerhouse. A move to the Pac-12, even in the league’s diminished form, would represent an ending of that tale, and nothing less than the end of an era.

Then the Gonzaga news stopped. A raft of subsequent reports refuted the original; the Zags were in talks with the Pac-12, yes, but nothing was close to agreed. We’ll see! Either way, though, this at least made sense: If you are a badly damaged west coast league trying to cobble together a new form from disparate parts, you can afford to ignore football in certain cases. You try to bring Gonzaga’s hoops program on board, full revenue share, no questions asked.

That was the one normal, understandable thing about what the Pac-12 is doing. Nothing else makes sense.

About an hour after McMurphy’s initial Gonzaga report, Memphis, Tulane, USF and UTSA announced on social media that they had decided, and publicly committed to, staying in the American Athletic Conference for the foreseeable future. Who? What?