Fans should celebrate the Pac-12, not mock it

College football’s stalest joke trotted out Saturday, its pants wrinkled, its tie stained. No. 3 Oregon lost 31-24 at Stanford in overtime and it became fashionable once again to mock the Pacific-12 Conference. The league’s last undefeated team barely made it into October before losing. Welcome back to the Conference That the College Football Playoff Forgot.

This is the Pac-12, the league that hasn’t been to the Playoff since 2016. That’s 0-for-4 during the Trump administration, and the Biden years aren’t starting so hot, either.

This is the Pac-12, winless against BYU (0-3) and against San Diego State (0-2).

This is the Pac-12, where you can’t tell up from down in the standings. Oregon State, picked to finish sixth in the North, leads the division. USC, picked 15^th in the nation, is 3-2 and fired its coach.

And I have to say — isn’t it grand? This old joke isn’t funny, but gird yourself against rolling your eyes. Instead, take it all in, because once you get past the national media obsession with the Playoff, the Pac-12 race is nothing if not entertaining. Trying to predict what is going to happen in the Pac-12 on any given Saturday is like trying to predict the path of a balloon after you let the air out of it.

Yes, the air has been let out of the Pac-12. But would you rather watch the SEC, where Alabama and Georgia win every week, and everyone knows that Alabama and Georgia will win every week? Don’t we love sports for the suspense? Live sports are the last bastion of network TV programming because we don’t know the outcome. And if there ever has been a league where we don’t know the outcome, it’s the Pac-12.

Stanford, a 17½-point underdog to USC, wins 42-28.

Colorado, a 2½-point favorite over Minnesota, loses 30-0.

Oregon State, an 11½-point underdog to USC, wins 45-27.

OK, maybe we do know the outcome with USC.

But my point is what the Pac-12 may be lacking in prowess, it is more than making up for in excitement.

The woes of the Pac-12 are not news. The league stepped onto the vicious cycle of missing the playoff, then watching the best prospects in its vast footprint leave for the bright lights and star wattage of Tuscaloosa and Clemson, then missing the playoff some more.

The quarterbacks of Alabama, Clemson, Georgia, Ole Miss, Ohio State and Iowa come from California. Spencer Rattler of Oklahoma is from Phoenix. From 2014-20, the Pac-12 put 22 players on the consensus All-America team. So did Alabama.

The failure to keep the talent home causes more problems. For decades, the league withstood the fan base erosion that the NFL caused college football programs in other metropolitan areas, programs such as Georgia Tech, Tulane, SMU and Minnesota.

The NFL abandoned Los Angeles for many years. But in the past five years, the Rams and the Chargers found their way back to Los Angeles just as USC lost its way to the college football elite. Combine that with the rise of the Dodgers and the rise of the Lakers, and the failure of USC and UCLA to consistently compete for championships translates into a loss of stature among southern California sports fans.

It’s nice to assume that the fans will return when the Trojans and Bruins return to the big time, but it would be only an assumption. We define “big-time” differently than we used to.

“What is the significance of the game?” asked Rick Neuheisel of CBS, a former coach at three Pac-12 schools. “From a national perspective, it’s all about the Playoff. In years past, the league was out of it before it started.”

This season, Oregon won at Ohio State in Week 2 and vaulted into the top four. It’s an improvement that when the Ducks lost at Stanford last Saturday, they fell only to No. 8. Oregon can climb back into the playoff race.

It’s just as possible, though, that the Pac-12 will resemble the Pac-10 of four decades ago, when the league’s programs would beat each other up, then send to the Rose Bowl a team that would upset the Big Ten representative in the Rose Bowl.

UCLA coach Terry Donahue made that into an art form. In 1983, the Bruins (8-3) overran Illinois 45-9.

“I was the quarterback! That was my team!” Neuheisel said. “Mike White was the coach at Illinois. What motivated us as much as anything is that they got to go the Playboy Mansion and we didn’t. Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy, went to Illinois. We went to school a mile away and couldn’t get in unless the back door was open.”

Donahue did it again two years later, the Bruins (8-2-1) soundly defeating Iowa (10-1) 45-28.

Fast forward to 2021, and I’m not so sure that a Rose Bowl victory will soothe what ails the Pac-12. But after five unpredictable weeks, it’s fun to anticipate what will happen on the road to Pasadena.

There is plenty of time for the Pac-12’s best team(s) to identify themselves, gain momentum, and peak at the Rose Bowl. Anyone can beat anyone. My advice is to listen to Lane Kiffin: Get your popcorn ready, throw down your headset and enjoy a great Pac-12 race.

There’s also this to consider — whoever represents the Pac-12 in the Arroyo Seco on Jan. 1, the odds are good that neither BYU nor San Diego State will be the opponent.