Pac-10 Expansion: Either Skip It, Or Do It Right

The Pac-10 conference is the perfectly-designed conference.  It is five pairs of natural rivals, spread out rather evenly across the West.  Any other major conference would love to have its innate clarity of arrangement.

While I do understand the perceived urgency to “keep up” with the other BCS conferences, it would be discouraging to do so at the expense of the Pac-10’s ideal layout.  The Big “10” made a reckless addition in Penn State and I am not sure anyone is still completely behind that alteration.

Right now, the Pac-10’s membership is comprised only of teams that belong together.  USC-UCLA, Cal-Stanford, Oregon-Oregon State, Arizona-Arizona State and Washington-Washington State.  There is a handsome symmetry there and to “force” another pairing just for the sake of expansion would ruin the purity of the Pac-10’s unflawed design.

I am hearing pairings like Utah/Boise State or Colorado/BYU and many other thrown-together combinations.  These are not ‘rivals’ nor are they natural pairings.  I don’t think things are bettered by “forcing” the pairing of the 11^th and 12^th schools.

So, my suggestion, as a Pac-10 fan for 35 years and a USC alum, is to skip the whole thing.  Skip 12 teams.  It just screws things up.

I don’t know if there are rules to how many basketball conference games can be played each year, but the Pac-10’s basketball scheduling is flawless as is.

Each pair of schools travels to another pair of schools every weekend.  You play Arizona and Arizona State on the road one weekend in the first half of the season and then you play them at home in the second half.  Four road trips and four homestands.  Add in going to your (nearby) rival’s arena once and hosting your (nearby) rival once, and for the entire Pac-10 basketball season, you only need four airplane roundtrips.

I suppose this scenario could withstand the adding of two more teams, but ONLY if you are allowed to add four more league games to get to 22.  You need to play every team at home and on the road to create the fairest scenario.

One of the best things about the Pac-10 football season is that every team plays the other nine teams every year.  This was not always true (they used to not play one team every year), but the conference season has been expanded to nine games and now every team plays every other, which is the only way to run a conference for football purposes.

The Pac-10 cannot have that awkward scenario that pops up in the Big Ten every so often where two teams tie for first but had not played each other.  That, my friends, is what they call a clusterfrak.

It is not possible to add two more conference games to everyone’s schedule (to make a total of 11), so adding two more teams will only cloud the process of crowning a football champion.

So, this is why I say to skip it.  Or, if you just can’t do that, go “all-in” and do it right.

“Doing it right” would mean go to 16 teams.  This creates football divisions and a conference championship game.  I don’t like this better than our current 10-team setup, but I like it infinitely better than the dopey 12-team scenario.

Three more pairs of teams is all you need.  You send feelers out to Colorado and Colorado State, Utah and Utah State (not BYU, mainly because of the fact that they will not compete on Sundays, even in the ‘small’ sports), UNLV and Nevada and to New Mexico and New Mexico State.

Utah State?  New Mexico State?  Nevada? 

While I agree that at this point none of these schools seem to be attractive to the “mighty” Pac-10, I encourage you to take a trip to Corvallis or to Pullman and tell me how “big time” those places seem.  Add in the fact that when Oregon State and Washington State were admitted to the Pac-10 they were much smaller and much less significant athletically than they are now and you will see how just being in the Pac-10 gives a smaller school like Utah State instant clout. 

Sure they may get run over a lot in the first few years, as Washington State and others did in their first years in the Pac-10, but they will be just as competitive as the “smaller” Pac-10 schools are now in no time.

You tell these potential new universities that they are only welcome in pairs.  If you want in, you better get to work on convincing your rival too.  It’s the pair or none.

Three pairs will be accepted and the conference will be separated into divisions.  I guess the divisions need to be South and North, otherwise you end up with a division with 8 current Pac-10 schools, a division with Arizona, Arizona State and the six new schools.  North and South would also allow for two California schools in each division, which I think would be satisfactory to all.

I must be honest, the thought of a 16 team “Pac-10” (the “Pac-16” sounds awful – maybe call it the “Pac One Six”) makes me throw up a little bit in the back of my throat.  However, the “Pac-12” induces a full-on gag reflex.

There is no way to defend a 12-team league when the current 10-team league is so splendidly-calculated.

If it is only about the almighty dollar, then, oh well, I suppose everything is today anyway.

So, the best solution is to do it right.  Don’t do it halfway and end up with an unbalanced conference with “leftover” teams. 

Go big, Pac-10.  Go big.