The End of an Era: 108-Year-Old Pac-12 Football Conference Takes Its Last Breath
LAS VEGAS — A 108-year-old football conference took its last breath here Friday, surrounded by 65,000 spectators dressed in either purple or neon green, with millions more watching with appreciation from afar.
On its last day on Earth, Pac-12 football enjoyed arguably the finest night of its life. It was tense. It was thrilling. And it was a horrible irony that this is how it ended.
As purple confetti soared toward the ceiling of sold-out Allegiant Stadium, third-ranked Washington celebrated a 34-31 win against fifth-ranked Oregon, its third breathtaking victory against its border rival in the past 13 months — and this one with substantially higher stakes. When Washington’s Dillon Johnson broke loose for a game-sealing 18-yard run, the Huskies ensured themselves a 13-0 regular season, a Pac-12 championship and their first trip to the College Football Playoff since 2016, also ending the Pac-12’s drought.
Watching Heisman contender Michael Penix Jr. drop dime after dime to one of his standout receivers, only for Oregon counterpart Bo Nix to drive his team right back to the field, you would never know this was anything but the product of a thriving conference that’s made for must-see television on a near-weekly basis all season. In addition to Penix and Nix, there was USC’s Caleb Williams, the reigning Heisman winner, and Arizona freshman Noah Fifita, the breakout star who led his team to its best season in a decade.
“We play some great football here on the West Coast,” Oregon linebacker Jeffrey Bassa said after his team’s loss. “The amount of (great) quarterbacks I’ve seen this year from week to week was insane.”
Washington jumped to a 20-3 first-half lead, only for Oregon to come racing back and go up 24-20. That was followed by back-to-back fourth-quarter Huskies touchdown drives to put the thing out of reach. Watching it all, it was easy to forget the 13-month saga of a failed media-rights negotiation that blew up a century of tradition and sent 10 of the league’s 12 schools racing for the exits. The #Pac12Refs even threw in a few head-scratching calls (overturned on replay) befitting the occasion.
“The historic tradition of what this conference has done, the great teams throughout all the years … it is sad to see it happen, and for that to be the last football game,” Washington coach Kalen DeBoer said.
The tense on-field action Friday, coupled with an electric stadium atmosphere, reflected just how far Pac-12 football has improved over the past several seasons. Nearly five years ago to the date, Washington beat Utah in a much drearier Pac-12 championship game between a pair of 9-3 teams, played in front of just 35,000 spectators at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. Washington’s 10-3 victory (the only touchdown was scored by the defense) felt more like the old Foster Farms Bowl than a Power 5 championship game.
That one marked the final night of a turbulent season that included an egregious scandal in which a conference executive interfered with an on-field replay decision, and then-commissioner Larry Scott spent his pregame news conference answering questions about his exorbitant salary. The Pac-12 was unquestionably in dire shape.
But even then, no one would have predicted it would one day die altogether.
Friday, Scott’s successor, George Kliavkoff, the man who presided over the league’s Waterloo, appeared on stage to hand DeBoer the championship trophy. The juxtaposition of a lame-duck commissioner standing next to one of the sport’s fastest-rising coaches was a telling portrait of this maddening year for the conference.
Just months after Lincoln Riley and Williams made USC interesting again, after long-forgotten Colorado hired headline-grabbing Deion Sanders, and on the precipice of Washington’s and Oregon’s dominant seasons, the TV networks that effectively run college sports determined they could live without Pac-12 football on their airwaves.
There’s no point rehashing the decade-plus of bad decisions and misguided hubris that led to the league’s demise. It happened. It’s over.
But that didn’t make Friday’s sendoff feel any less surreal.
The familiar Pac-12 crest that sat painted at midfield Friday will soon be relegated to scrapbooks, YouTube videos and, at least for one year, Oregon State and Washington State’s jersey patches. A year from now, if Oregon and Washington are to play for another conference championship, their fans will have to fly three time zones to Indianapolis to watch it. Las Vegas, a budding sports mecca, may host more Mountain West championships going forward than a league comparable to the Pac-12.
It’s heartbreaking. It’s maddening. And worst of all, it was all so avoidable.
But Washington will represent the Pac-12 for at least one more week — possibly, poetically, against Big Ten champion Michigan in the Rose Bowl. No league team has won a Playoff game since the first one, in 2014, when Marcus Mariota-led Oregon crushed Jameis Winston-led Florida State 59-20. Penix, who was serenaded by “Heisman” chants on the postgame trophy stage, has a chance to leave the same legacy as past West Coast greats like Mariota, John Elway and Andrew Luck.
The Huskies will presumably be underdogs against a Big Ten or SEC opponent, but don’t count them out. For once, the Pac-12 representative may enter the field as the most battle-tested of the group. Washington’s 13 wins include four over teams ranked in the committee’s most recent Top 25 (No. 5 Oregon twice, No. 14 Arizona and No. 20 Oregon State), and a fifth, Utah, that spent all but the last two weeks in the polls.
“Understanding just how strong the conference was this year. There were (nine) teams that at one point were ranked in the Top 25, and we played the best ones — and we played one of them twice,” said DeBoer. “I don’t think there’s anyone else in the country that’s gone through what we went through.”
After the confetti had stopped and the stadium had cleared, with the teams back in their locker rooms or loading onto buses, one last celebration — or wake — took place on the field. As a group of Pac-12 employees gathered on the deserted risers, the stadium video board rolled movie-style credits as “Good Riddance” by Green Day blared from the stadium speakers: “I hope you had the time of your life.” They clapped, they smiled. At least a couple of them wiped away tears.
And with that, we bid farewell to our departed friend.
All 12 schools will keep playing football in their various new locales. They will produce more great players. They will win big games, and possibly more championships. But West Coast college football may never enjoy another night as perfect as Friday’s.