Football goes for the green again

By David Mullen

When I began at UC Berkeley, the California Golden Bears were part of a prestigious group of university athletic programs that made up a conference called the Pacific-8, shortened to the Pac-8. Our rivals were the nearby Stanford Indians (now nicknamed Cardinal after the color, not the bird). 

Cal couldn’t measure up in football with the conference powerhouses University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Southern California (USC), but it didn’t matter. Getting a quality education was the name of the game.

It was a time when a college football game was a social event on campus, bursting with tradition. A game didn’t require fancy suites, a national TV audience or a victory party to enjoy.  

There was great pride just being a member of the Pac-8. The conference was home to the Big Game between Cal and Stanford, first played in 1892. The winner of the UCLA versus USC game received the Victory Bell, the alumni — not the players — of Oregon and Oregon State vied for the Platypus Trophy, and the Apple Cup went to the winner of the Washington/Washington State game. 

Football players who played in the Pac-8 included O. J. Simpson, Jim Plunkett, Dan Fouts, Ron Yary, Jerry Robinson, Chuck Muncie, Ronnie Lott, Joe Kapp, Ron Mix, Willie Wood, Lynn Swann, Anthony Davis, Steve Bartkowski, Warren Moon, Ed White, Mel Renfro, Anthony Munoz, Mike Garrett, Kenny Easley and Gary Beban, among others.  Watching great players was a benefit of college life.

Before the letter writing campaign begins, All-Americans Jackie Jensen, Hugh McElhenny, Ernie Nevers and Frank Gifford played in the Pacific Coast Conference before it became the Pac-8. Pro Football Hall of Famers Marcus Allen, John Elway, Troy Aikman, Junior Seau, Jonathan Ogden and Tony Gonzales among others played after the Pac-8 conference was expanded.

The culmination of the Pac-8 football season was the conference champion facing the Big Ten Conference (which had exactly 10 teams at the time) winner on New Year’s Day in the annual Rose Bowl Game in Pasadena. Until 1975, Pac-8 teams were not allowed to participate in any other bowl game.

In 1978, the Pac-8 became the Pac-10 when the University of Arizona and Arizona State University were added to the conference to increase revenue. I was a play-by-play voice for Cal football broadcasts on the campus radio station and announced the Cal vs. Arizona State. ASU felt like interlopers crashing a righteous ceremony.

In 2010, the conference became greedier and rebranded as the Pac-12, adding Utah and Colorado. Generations of tradition seemed as lost as the Pop Warner’s single wing offense.

On June 30, ESPN confirmed the stunning news that UCLA and USC are joining the Big Ten Conference in early 2024, news similar in effect to Oklahoma and Texas announcing plans to join the Southeastern Conference (SEC) by 2025. Dissolving the Pac-12 Conference is now a forgone conclusion.

“There are so many layers to this. Where to begin?” said ESPN college football analyst Rod Gilmore, a defensive back at Stanford from 1979 to 1982. “This is clearly a money move and the welfare of the athletes didn’t even make the list of concerns. It’s not the players that are eliminating ‘amateurism.’ It’s the adults in charge. Missing classes and increased physical and mental issues are all things that will come into play with the constant travel across multiple time zones.”

College football used to be steeped in beliefs. Now it is all about money. Long after calling Dallas my home, I felt a similar sense of loss when the Southwest Conference disbanded. It made financial sense for certain programs, but it still felt unsettling to treat college football like a commodity product.  

“We are now in the Super Conference era,” Gilmore said. “The teams have nothing in common other than the desire for TV money. There is no connection by geography, rivalry, academic profile, collegiality or anything else. It’s becoming the AFC vs. the NFC and we’ll have nondescript games like Rutgers vs. UCLA. It might as well be the Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. the New York Jets. Who cares?

“Why is it that when players transfer for better deals or NIL [name, image and likeness] money, everyone is up in arms and wants Congress to intervene or they call for guardrails? But we hear crickets when a university leaves for a new conference for money and leaves so much distraction in its wake?”

Part of the distain that old-fashioned college football fans have, especially those with ties to the Pac-8 or even Pac-10 or Pac-12, is that decisions on college football’s future are being made in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms. “I don’t know how USC, UCLA and the Big Ten [Conference] kept this so quiet,” Gilmore said, about the LA school’s move to the Big Ten. “The public board is supposed to have public meetings for university business, and I can’t find an exception that works for them. The penalty is to undo the approval and force UCLA to redo this in public. But no one seems to have the interest or stomach for this.”

In the short term, the move to the Big Ten could hurt USC and UCLA. “On the field, I believe that UCLA and USC will struggle in the Big Ten, despite the extra money and arrival of [former OU and new USC head coach] Lincoln Riley. There isn’t much recent evidence to suggest that either team can be more than mediocre,” Gilmore, still a Bay Area resident, stated. “Both programs have opened the door to more teams recruiting athletes in California. We have been losing elite athletes from California for the last several years at an alarming rate. Now, Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson and Michigan State won’t be the only ones stealing the best players in the state.”

Gilmore envisions what he calls “The Market.” With TV revenue from Fox and ESPN leading the way, he can see the future of college football in levels: two Super Conferences made up of a reimagined SEC and Big Ten (or NFL Light as he calls it), former Power 5 teams and conferences that can’t compete with the Super Conferences (probably where SMU would fall), other groups of Power 5 teams and the non-revenue generating Ivy League. Notre Dame, an independent with huge national notoriety, remains a wild card.

“The Pac-12 is dead, or [at best] a zombie conference if it manages to survive with a mediocre TV deal,” Gilmore said. “I don’t think Stanford wants to be in the ‘professional model,’ and Oregon and Washington may not have the appeal some are saying. No team in the Pac-12 can survive without a huge TV deal and backfill the financial loss with university money. Stanford could [survive] with its $30 billion endowment, but it won’t spend any of it on athletics. Some teams will leave, and others will push for a merger, but it’s going to be an ugly existence for most of them.

“This isn’t good for college football, but it is ‘The Market’ at work,” Gilmore said. “It’s fair to question whether colleges can truly engage in ‘sports entertainment’ in an academic environment without losing their soul. Maybe not. It’s strictly business now.”

For a non-football power school like UC Berkeley, college football may have lost its historical foundation and academic integrity with the expansion to the Arizona desert in 1978. It became a business. 

At least Berkeley has excellent business and law schools to create case studies if education even matters in football anymore.