LAS VEGAS – A 108-year-old football conference breathed its last here Friday, surrounded by 65,000 spectators dressed in either purple or neon green and millions more watching with appreciation from afar.
On its last day on earth, Pac-12 football had arguably the best night of its life. It was tense. It was exciting.
And it was a terrible irony that it ended like that.
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As purple confetti shot to the ceiling of sold-out Allegiant Stadium, third-place Washington celebrated a 34-31 victory over fifth-place Oregon, its third stunning win against its border rival in the last 13 months – and this one with significantly higher stakes. When Washington’s Dillon Johnson broke through with a game-winning 18-yard run, the Huskies secured a 13-0 regular season, a Pac-12 championship and their first appearance in the College Football Playoff since 2016, also securing the Pac- 12 ended drought.
Watching Heisman contender Michael Penix Jr. drop penny after dime on one of his standout receivers, only for Oregon counterpart Bo Nix to drive his team right back onto the field, you’d never guess this anything but the result of a successful conference made for must-see television, airing almost weekly throughout the season. In addition to Penix and Nix, there was USC’s Caleb Williams, the reigning Heisman winner, and Arizona rookie Noah Fifita, the breakout star who led his team to its best season in a decade.
“We play 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 week to week this year has been crazy.”
Washington took a 20-3 lead in the first half, but Oregon quickly came back to take a 24-20 lead. That was followed by back-to-back touchdown attempts by the Huskies in the fourth quarter to put things out of reach. Looking at all this, it’s easy to forget the 13-month saga of a failed media rights negotiation that shattered a century-old tradition and left 10 of the league’s 12 schools in a race to get out. The #Pac12Refs even threw in a few head-shaking calls (which were saved on replay) to suit the occasion.
“The historic tradition of what this conference has done, the great teams over the years … it’s sad to see this happen and for this to be the last football game,” Washington coach Kalen DeBoer said.
Battle-hardened Washington broke the Pac-12’s streak of missing the College Football Playoff in the final season of its existence as fans know it. (Kirby Lee/USA Today)
Friday’s tense action, coupled with an electric stadium atmosphere, reflected how much Pac-12 football has improved in recent seasons. Nearly five years ago, Washington defeated Utah in a much grittier Pac-12 championship game between two 9-3 teams played in front of just 35,000 fans at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. Washington’s 10-3 win (the only touchdown was scored by the defense) felt more like the old Foster Farms Bowl than a Power 5 championship game.
That was the final night of a tumultuous season that featured an outrageous scandal in which a conference executive interfered in an on-field replay decision and then-commissioner Larry Scott spent his pregame press conference fielding questions about his exorbitant salary answer. The Pac-12 was undoubtedly in bad shape. But even then, no one would have thought that one day it would die out completely.
On Friday, Scott’s successor George Kliavkoff, the man who presided over the league’s Waterloo, appeared on stage to present DeBoer with the championship trophy. The juxtaposition of a lame-duck commissioner next to one of the sport’s fastest-rising coaches was a telling portrait of this crazy 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 dominant seasons at Washington and Oregon, the television networks that effectively cover college sports decided that they could do without Pac-Man. 12 Football on the air.
There’s no point in rehashing the decade-plus years 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 farewell any less surreal.
The familiar Pac-12 crest painted at midfield Friday will soon be relegated to scrapbooks, YouTube videos and, at least for a year, on the jersey patches of Oregon State and Washington State. When Oregon and Washington play for another conference championship a year from now, their fans will have to fly three time zones to Indianapolis to watch it. Las Vegas, an emerging sports mecca, could host more Mountain West championships in the future than a league comparable to the Pac-12.
It’s heartbreaking. It’s insane. And the worst part was that it was all so preventable.
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But Washington will represent the Pac-12 for at least another week — possibly, poetically speaking, against Big Ten champion Michigan in the Rose Bowl. No league team has won a playoff game since the first game in 2014, when Marcus Mariota-led Oregon beat Jameis Winston-led Florida State 59-20. Penix, who was accompanied by chants of “Heisman” on the postgame trophy stage, has a chance to leave the same legacy as previous West Coast greats like Mariota, John Elway and Andrew Luck.
The Huskies will likely be underdogs against a Big Ten or SEC opponent, but don’t count them out. For once, the Pac-12 representative could take the field as the most battle-tested of the group. Washington’s 13 wins include four wins against 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 win, Utah, which is all but the Last two weeks all surveys were conducted in the USA.
“I understand how strong the conference was this year. There were (nine) teams that were ranked in the top 25 at one point, and we were playing the best — and we played one of them twice,” DeBoer said. “I don’t think there’s anyone else in the country who’s been through what we’ve been through.”
After the confetti had stopped and the stadium was cleared and the teams were back in their locker rooms or loaded onto buses, a final ceremony – or wake – was held on the field. As a group of Pac-12 employees gathered on the deserted risers, a cinematic credits played on the stadium’s video board while Green Day’s “Good Riddance” blared from the stadium speakers: “I hope you had the time of your life.” “They clapped, they smiled. At least a few of them wiped away tears.
And with that we say goodbye to our deceased friend.
All 12 schools will continue to play football at their various new locations. They will produce more great players. They will win big games and possibly more championships.
But West Coast college football may never again experience a night as perfect as Friday’s.
(Top photo: Jeff Speer / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)