#Pac-12 Conference

[dhart4214]

SO CAL COLLEGE SOFTBALL: Our Look 2024's Top Teams

UCLA Softballers during their annual Jackie Robinson Day. Photo courtesy of twitter.com OUR LOOK AT THE BEST COLLEGIATE SOFTBALL TEAMS THAT SO CAL HAS TO OFFER IN 2024 At a glance… UCLA BRUINS Current Record: 27-9, 12-3 and first place in the Pac-12 Conference Rank: 7th Last Game: Beat then #5 Stanford, 2-1, on April 21st (part of a three-game sweep) Next Game: at Long Beach State on April…

[bongaboi]

Oregon: 2023-24 Pac-12 Men's Basketball Champions

LAS VEGAS – N'Faly Dante, playing with a bruised tailbone, made all 12 of his shots and scored 25 points, and Oregon secured an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament by defeating Colorado 75-68 on Saturday night in the conference tournament title game to end the Pac-12 basketball era.

By winning the conference tournament, fourth-seeded Oregon (23-11) extended its postseason because the Ducks weren't projected to receive an at-large invitation to the 68-team field. This was the Ducks' sixth Pac-12 Tournament championship and first since 2019.

Third-seeded Colorado (23-10) is expected to receive an at-large bid. The Buffaloes' eight-game winning streak ended.

Dante, who was injured in Friday's semifinal victory over Arizona, also had nine rebounds and three steals and was named the tournament's most outstanding player. Also for Oregon, Jackson Shelstad scored 17 points and Jermaine Couisnard finished with 14.

KJ Simpson led the Buffaloes with 23 points, and Luke O'Brien had 11.

The score was tied at 62 when Shelstad made two free throws and Jadrian Tracey a layup to put the Ducks ahead by four points with 2:41 left. They never trailed again.

The atmosphere wasn't quite what might be expected of a historical conference playing, for now at least, its final basketball game. When sixth-ranked Arizona bowed out Friday night, so did nearly all of its rabid fans who flocked to what has become known as McKale North. The fans who did show up Saturday, filling maybe half of T-Mobile Arena, were high in energy — if not numbers.

Oregon once again was part of a final Pac-12 event, having also played in the football championship in December. The Ducks and three of their brethren will be headed to the Big Ten Conference in the coming months.

Colorado and three other Pac-12 teams will soon call the Big 12 Conference home, and California and Stanford will play in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Only Oregon State and Washington State remain behind, determined to preserve the Pac-12 in some way, even naming Teresa Gould as league commissioner for the next two years.

Whether those two schools find a way to keep the conference alive remains to be seen, and in the meantime they will align with the Mountain West in football and West Coast Conference in other sports. A full merger at some point is a possibility.

Gone for certain is the Pac-12 as it's long been known, the so-called Conference of Champions with a rich basketball history, with Saturday night's championship game the last notable event in that sport.

[news4usonline]

Cal surprises UCLA with road win

The UCLA Bruins football team started their 2023 campaign with a bang. It ended with a loud thud. After starting the season off winning three straight games, the Bruins closed the regular season losing three of their last four games, including dropping a 33-7 beatdown to the Cal Golden Bears at the Rose Bowl Stadium.   Suffice it to say, the defeat to Cal at home was not the way that Chip Kelly…

[anygivengameday]

San Diego State Aztecs at UCLA Bruins

Friday, October 20, 2023

Wallis Annenberg Stadium, Westwood, Los Angeles, CA

[garyconkling]

College Football Goes Pro

Big-time college football is rushing to become pro football on Saturday. Only a few premier teams will make the cut. It may be regrettable, but it will be absolutely watchable.

Conference realignment, the transfer portal and compensation for athletes have rushed college football closer to professional football on Saturday. Reaching that dubious end zone may only be a quarterback sneak away. Defections from the Big 12 and Pacific Coast Conference have turned the Big 10 and SEC into super-conferences. The Big 12 scrambled to replace its name-plate former members by…

[the-physicality]

"if the money, timing, & security can be appealing enough"

LMAO name me 3 things the wnba doesn't have for $200

[mrjaypayton]

State of NCAA

College Football will never be the same. Amateur sports became professional sports.

Everything is corporate now.

[collegefootballcountdown]

Pac 12 no more

[nervouswreck-96]

There has to be a Matt McMuscles "Wha Happun" episode on the state of the Pac-12 Conference.

[dhart4214]

ANOTHER DAY WITH UCLA GYMNASTICS: Checking Out Their Senior Meet

Bruin gymnast Frida Esparza (left) getting congratulated by UCLA coach Janelle McDonald (in pink) and the rest of her teammates after her standout performance on the bars on February 14th. Photo courtesy of dailynews.com AN UPDATE REGARDING MY FAVORITE TEAM IN THE SPORTS UNIVERSE, PLUS A MENTION OF SOMETHING INCREDIBLE THAT HAPPENED I reckon it’s time for updating what’s been up with the UCLA…

[justinssportscorner]

Alex Kirshner at Slate:

The Pac-12 Conference, which started in 1915 as the Pacific Coast Conference and donned a bunch of names over a successful century of Western teams playing games with each other, is dead. After USC and UCLA exited for the Big Ten last summer, and after Colorado headed for the Big 12 last month, the conference took on additional water on Friday: Oregon and Washington, the Pac-12’s biggest remaining fish, joined their Los Angeles counterparts in the Big Ten. The Big 12 Conference is now also adding Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah, news that broke just minutes after the Pacific Northwest schools decided to join the Midwest. The future is deeply murky for the biggest schools left in the Pac-12 now, Stanford and Cal in the Bay Area. And it looks only grim for two of the quirkiest and most fun programs in college football: Oregon State and Washington State, who are losing their blood rivals (Oregon and Washington) to another league but aren’t getting the call to decamp themselves. The specifics will fall into place in the days ahead. The big picture is already a bleak one. The degradation of the Pac-12, and now its imminent outright death as anything like what it has always been, is a college sports tragedy. In some part, this moment is a natural destination for a train that left its station decades ago and will run over more of college sports’ nice old things in the years to come. But what has happened to the Pac-12 wasn’t inevitable and certainly didn’t need to unfold as quickly as it did. What college sports fans know as the Conference of Champions is at death’s door because of cold, hard capitalism, yes, but also because the people in charge of stewarding the Pac-12 were the wrong mix of arrogant and incompetent.

College sports has been transmogrifying into a made-for-TV product since the mid-1980s, when the Supreme Court stripped the NCAA of its top-down control of football television rights and left teams and conferences to make their own agreements. As one cycle of gigantic TV deals has given way to the next, the Pac-12 has slid into a more pronounced disadvantage against its peers in the South and Midwest. College football is a religion in the Southeastern Conference’s footprint and in much of the Big Ten’s, though the latter now covers both the parts of the country obsessed with football and the parts that are not. The Big Ten and SEC have lucrative TV networks of their own that they run in partnership with ESPN and Fox, and the leagues sell the rights to broadcast their games—their inventory, in industry parlance—for hundreds of millions of dollars. The financial edge of the big two leagues cost the Pac-12 both UCLA and USC in a realignment move to the Big Ten last summer, and the same edge has now cost them Oregon and Washington to render the Pac-12 unrecognizable. When those schools left, three others fled in response to the Big 12, and suddenly, it was all over. The Northwestern Big Ten entrants might only get half the money of a normal Big Ten member, but that will be more than they were likely to get if they had stayed in the outgunned Pac-12. Someone might look at the TV cash disparity and conclude the Pac-12 never had a chance to survive. But the Pac-12’s predicament is worse than simply not being able to compete financially with the Big Ten and SEC. The world was big enough for the league to survive in a reasonably strong form anyway, as a secondary but still powerful conference with a distinct Western identity. The reason the Pac-12 is instead finished is that its leaders messed up repeatedly and gruesomely until they couldn’t blow it anymore.

[...] All of this adds up to something a little less severe than the death of Western college football, because the teams involved will keep playing games. Fans will keep tailgating, their lives mostly unaffected by how much TV money their alma maters are raking in. But the reduction or demise of the Pac-12 will have serious costs. It could end either the Washington–Washington State rivalry known as the Apple Cup or the Oregon–Oregon State game that they used to call the Civil War. (The departing schools say they’ll prioritize maintaining those games, and we can only hope that stays true forever.) It will weaken the geographic distinction in a sport that used to see provincialism as a feature, not a bug. And it will pit schools against teams they share no history or animus with, in an 18-team Big Ten (at least) where some teams will go years without playing each other. They’ll all be richer. There is no guarantee that they, or anyone, will be happier.

The demise of the Pac-12 was entirely avoidable. USC and UCLA's defections to the Big Ten (B1G) were the warning shot of P12's demise; however, the conference still could have been in a manageable shape.

But when Colorado hightailed it back to the Big 12, the dominoes began to really unravel for the Pac-12's survival. Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah joined Colorado to the Big 12, and Washington and Oregon went to the B1G, leaving behind Washington State, Oregon State, Cal, and Stanford in a rudderless P12.

In truth, the Pac-12's disaster began with the Pac 12 Networks, and will end with messes.

[news4usonline]

Bruins get defensive in win against Colorado

PASADENA, Calif. (News4usonline) – The Colorado hype machine came to the Rose Bowl Stadium to play UCLA. The Bruins defeated the Buffaloes with a lot of defense, timely offensive plays, and overcoming a first half filled with turnovers. The first half of the UCLA-Colorado football game was played to a standstill. The halftime scoreboard read: Bruins 7, Buffaloes 6. It should have been more in…

[sportsnewsinusa]

The Great College Sports Migration: A Reshaping of Power and Influence

The Dawn of the Super-Conference Era The landscape of collegiate athletics underwent a seismic shift, ushering in the super-conference era. This evolution not only transformed the Pac-12 but also had a significant impact on other major conferences. A conference that nurtured legends like Jackie Robinson, John Elway, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Barry Bonds, is now reeling from the loss of its prominent members to competing conferences. The Big Ten Expansion: Embracing the Pacific Northwest The Big Ten conference made a significant move, capitalizing on this changing environment by extending membership to the Pacific Northwest rivals, the University of Oregon and University of Washington. With these additions, the Big Ten becomes an 18-team coast-to-coast conference, expanding its footprint to the West Coast. Oregon was swift to solidify its new affiliation with a unanimous vote by the school's board of trustees. As Oregon President John Karl Scholz stated, "Our student-athletes will participate at the highest level of collegiate athletic competition, and our alumni, friends, and fans will be able to carry the spirit of Oregon across the country." The Big 12 Board of Directors has voted to accept Arizona State University, University of Arizona, and University of Utah to the Big 12 Conference, per multiple sources pic.twitter.com/9o9rd9W8dc — Read the full article

[chellsiememmel]

tbh what is even the POINT of college football without the chaos of Pac-12 After Dark™️???? everyone go back now