Musings From Arledge: USC to the Big Ten

It’s about time.

For the last decade, USC has been in the college football version of a cheesy 80’s movie starring one or both Coreys. You know the plot: There’s a girl with hidden beauty who’s so sweet but doesn’t know her true worth. So she stays with the narcissistic boyfriend, who is rude to her, flirts with other girls, and the entitlement of an OU fan. Of course, her nerdy guy friend – Haim? Feldman? No, Anthony Michael Hall – keeps trying to tell her she’s too good for that guy, but she just doesn’t see it. Until one day when fate intervenes, and she gets a makeover, a sudden boost of confidence, is suddenly the most attractive girl in the high school, and she finally understands that she really does have value. So she kicks her old boyfriend to the curb. He’s stunned and disgraced. Hall has tears in his eyes. The audience cheers. Cut to closing credits and a Cyndi Lauper song.

It’s not at all clear why one of the great private universities in the country should have a decade-long self-esteem problem. Get a grip, people! B-level celebrities are going to jail to get their spoiled, Instagram-addicted offspring into this place! But the proof is in the conduct. How else to explain why USC would tolerate Pat Haden’s personnel decisions and Clay Helton’s Warrior Speech? Would any self-respecting blue-blood program do that? How else to explain why USC would stay in its abusive relationship with the Pac-12 conference for all these years? 

What?! Leave Pat and Clay? Find another conference? Why would you even say that, Marcie? A real, professional athletic director, a coach that doesn’t drool on his play sheet, a conference that doesn’t undermine me – those are things for girls that are pretty and smart, not for girls like me. 

Well, look what we have here: USC has finally finished its transformation. It hired a real football coach and has now kicked the abusive boyfriend to the curb. We will see much bellyaching from Pac-12 sources about how USC and UCLA betrayed their conference friends and secretly stabbed them in the back. Don’t believe a word of it. This was the obvious move and has been for years. I’ve been advocating it here for some years myself. USC was forced into it. 

The Pac-12 was a sinking ship. Part of the problem is the conference just has too many schools with very low ceilings – and not just the hapless members like Wazzu and Oregon State. Those schools just can’t compete over the long-term because of their geography and lack of any real appeal. The conference would have been justified in ghosting them years ago and simply forgetting to invite them to conference meetings. But even the better conference members are limited compared to the top-tier teams from the power conferences. Yes, Oregon is committed. But Oregon has a natural ceiling – a ceiling that just came crashing in unless the Ducks can beg their way into the Big 10, see below – because there is no natural recruiting base up there. And because it’s hard to get ahead in the Information Economy when you can’t read.  And because there are some things money can’t buy – like class. 

Utah has a solid coach and wants to win. But Utah has an even lower ceiling. It has the recruiting disadvantages of Oregon but without Montgomery Burns propping it up.

The Arizona schools are closer to talent, and we know that they don’t have to worry that their commitment to academic excellence might get in the way of athletic glory, but they will always be, at best, stepping-stone programs for up-and-coming coaches.

And the programs that have the geography, prestige, and monetary resources to be great, simply choose not to be. Stanford and Cal have never been committed to football success. Stanford is content to win the sports that nobody watches, and Cal is content to … I don’t know, encourage the workers of the world to unite? Not sure. But it ain’t football.

And the conference really didn’t care that much about winning. It watched Tennis Larry drive the worst business plan since New Coke and actually extended the guy and continued to shovel money at him. It’s primary value was parity, which in this context means providing a terrible product that you can’t sell. For years, the Conference of Champions* was content to barely surpass the American Athletic Conference in gridiron achievement while making sure to evently divide a pie that kept shrinking relative to its richer (better run) peers. The conference insisted on sharing all revenues equally – an insistence that kept the Pac-12 from becoming a true rival to the SEC and Big 10 in football terms when it likely blew up the possibility of landing Oklahoma and Texas – and made no effort whatsoever to protect its flagship football program, because the conference Lilliputians were more interested in having an equal slice of pie – no matter how small – than in actually growing the pie if that meant the schools that actually drive the economic engine would make a few dollars more. 

* In the sports nobody watches

And they gave most of the pie to Larry Scott anyway, so he could fiddle in a lavish office as he watched the conference burn. Yeah, let’s stick with that theme for a second. Much like the late Roman Republic, the old system was fundamentally broken – inescapably so – but the conference leaders were like much of the Roman Senate: their world was falling apart, but for most of the most important players, the primary consideration was just to make sure that nobody could rise any higher than anybody else. Hey, that guy is rising too high! Pull him down! So the Republic blew up. And, now, so has the Pac-12.

The scramble is now on. Washington and Oregon will look to flee to the Big 10. I’m not sure yet if they can. The Arizona schools were probably on the phone with the Big 12 in minutes, because while the Big 12 has little to offer these days, it beats sticking around in what is, effectively, the new Mountain West. Colorado and Utah? Who knows? Maybe the same. Cal and Stanford? Stanford should join the Ivy League or just compete in crew with Oxford and Cambridge. Cal can join the Warsaw Pact. There just aren’t a lot of obvious, good options for these programs. 

They have no excuse. These guys should have seen this coming for years – I saw it coming for years and just didn’t think USC had the guts to pull the rip cord – and they should have done something about it. Instead, they insisted on being a second-rate organization that asks USC to play Thursday night games in Pullman on a network that nobody can watch in front of referees that might be trained monkeys. Or untrained monkeys. 

The talk when USC landed Lincoln Riley was that a resurgent USC could revitalize the Pac-12. Sure, a little bit. But why should USC try to lift all that dead weight off the ground, especially when a high-flying USC still couldn’t turn the Pac-12 into a competitor of the Big 10 and SEC. So what was USC to do? Out of undeserved loyalty to its conference peers stick around and try to compete with Ohio State and Alabama with a football budget of 40, 60, or 80 million dollars less? Those programs can build out world-class coaching and support staffs, facilities that embarrass most NFL franchises, and recruit with unlimited budgets and USC will scrape by on their relative pennies so they can stay true to the Oregon States and Colorados of the world, programs that have nothing to offer and whose view of ground-breaking innovation is 9:00 am kickoffs? 

No. We’ll pass. Thanks. The only reason for USC to do that is if USC just doesn’t care about competing in football. The rest of the conference knew that – they really did – and they simply hoped that the Pat Haden mentality would stay in Troy forever. It didn’t.

Now let’s talk about what could be the sweetest part of this deal. Late last year, when new Oregon coach Dan Lanning and his staff started to make their sales pitch in the media, they liked to talk about how Oregon is the SEC of the West. In terms of academic achievement, sure. I’d even say they’re the Riverside Community College of the Northwest. But as a football statement, it was utter foolishness. Oregon doesn’t have the recruiting base of Alabama, LSU, or Florida, and it can never compete with those programs long-term if those other guys are competently led. That’s why Oregon coaches jump the second they have any success. They go where the players are. 

But Oregon fans live in a state of delusion. They think their program is a blue blood. In reality, Oregon is a 1970’s Chevy Malibu that has had a ton of money poured into it by a guy with an open collar, hairy chest, and gold chains. (And not the good Arab ones from Ardmore, either!) It has shiny rims – we wear different rims every week! – a big engine, and a nice radio. And there’s nothing wrong with the souped-up Malibu. It has its appeal. Just don’t go around telling everybody you have a Ferrari, Oregon fans. Oregon football is not – and never will be – a Ferrari. And with the LA schools off to greener pastures and Oregon currently stuck in the New Conference of Champions/New Mountain West, Oregon’s future So Cal recruiting efforts look like the last scene of a Tarantino movie. 

Maybe Oregon can apply to join the Sun Belt Conference with Georgia Southern. Oregon is at its best when it’s competing with Clay Helton, so that could be a good fit.

Oregon is begging the Big 10 to accept its application. And it may work; I don’t know. But I’m praying it doesn’t. I know USC wouldn’t do it, but I wish the Trojans had insisted that it would join the Big 10 only if Oregon is never allowed to join. USC just kicked Oregon out of a moving car and into a ditch 200 miles from civilization. Oregon is begging to be let back in the car. I think USC should do a U-turn, head back to where Oregon is crying on the side of the road, stop just long enough to steal Oregon’s water bottle, and then drive on. We’ll make sure to check out your 9:00 am battles with new conference rival San Diego State, Oregon!

The SEC of the West? How about the MAC of the West, Ducks? 

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Okay, in reality, I don’t think Oregon is going to be left in the Big Sky Conference, as much as I would love to see it. Washington and Oregon will join the Big 10. The Big 10 can’t be that selective; they let Maryland and Rutgers in. They’ll probably take North Carolina, and maybe even Duke, although basketball revenues don’t really drive these decisions. And, eventually the Big 10 will land Notre Dame, too, when the ACC collapses. (Clemson, Miami, and Florida State will join the SEC.) Notre Dame will hold out for as long as it can. But the stronger the SEC and Big 10 get, the easier it is for those two conferences to dominate college football decision-making. They can eventually lock the Irish out of the playoff. And some years in the future, the USC-Notre Dame game will decide who gets to play the Ohio State-Michigan winner for the Big 10 title. And you know what – that actually sounds like fun.

So do road trips to Columbus, Ann Arbor, Madison, State College, and Lincoln. Well, watching a game in those stadiums sounds like fun. I’m not sure how many nights I’ll want to stay. 

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Traditions matter in college football more than most sports. I understand why many people are uncomfortable with moves like this. Maybe college football will eventually lose those things that make it great. But USC has to change with the times. We can’t ride into battle on horses against the Panzers because we like the way things used to be. I can handle losing the Stanford rivalry if that’s how it plays out. Fans of Oklahoma and Nebraska, Texas and Texas A&M have lost out on more recently. The reality is that college football is changing at light speed. Conferences are growing and imploding, the transfer portal means no roster is ever truly set, and NIL has revolutionized recruiting and the lifestyles of the star players. You can long for the old days if you wish – I sometimes do – but we can’t live in the old days and compete with Alabama and Ohio State. So USC has decided to compete with Ohio State. Literally. It’s the right choice.