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Terence's 1 point plan for ending these articles for the next ten years: Anyone who writes one, gets sent to live in Bill Walton's teepee for a week while he pours special dirt from Temecula over them and plays the glockenspiel and tells them about the time the Dead played the Greek and Jerry went for a 26 minute solo on Dark Star. CONFERENCE OF CHAMPIONS.

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Apr 26, 2021Liked by Nick Kranz

All good points Nick. And there are a few more: 1. PAC12 teams play 9 games against other conference opponents. That means they play 1 more game against conference opponents than the SEC does. (Alabama is famous for scheduling a weak outside team later in the season. It's almost like a second 'bye' for them). What does this one game mean? It means half of the PAC12 teams will lose an additional conference game which can YUGELY impact rankings and the outcome of a season. A one loss USC, UW, OR, Utah, Stanfurd or any other PAC12 team that in the running for a playoff spot, that loses a second conference game, is out of the playoffs. So when OR plays UW late in the season, one team is out of playoff contention. When USC plays Stanfurd late in the season, one will be out of contention. When Utah plays USC late in the season, one will be out of contention. Same for Oregon and Stanfurd. Hell, CAL, UCLA, UW, OSU, CO and ASU can wreck any PAC12 team's playoff hopes. That's how good our teams are across the board. And then you get Alabama going to the playoffs after they lose the SEC Championship? Yeah, that's fair. I call bullshit. It's all about TV revenue and it fucks every other team trying to recruit against them. And, it's why we need a 16 team playoff. You'll see some Cinderella teams every year like UCF knock off some the best teams the way they did Auburn. Until the playoffs are fixed BIG MONEY will control who gets to the playoffs which will impact recruiting. Second, tell me one school in the SEC or ACC that has the same academic admission requirements as CAL, Stanfurd, UCLA, UW, & USC? Maybe Vanderbilt? Right now college football conferences are not equal and they probably never will be. Btw, we have plenty of potential fans in the Bay area or LA area or any of the other PAC12 team locations. But we have more pro sports and college teams our big cities than Tuscaloosa or Clemson or most of the SEC and ACC teams. Is there any SEC city that has 2 P5 college programs 30 miles apart with 5 pro sports teams, surfing and sailing in your back yard and skiing 4 hours away? But, even with all that, fans love a winner. If CAL becomes a winner, we'll pack the stadium again. And I'd dare to say the same for any PAC12 team. A 16 team playoff would change recruiting forever and change the face of college football as a result.

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If we are so sure that the PAC-12 has greater parity than the SEC or the ACC, we should replace that 9th conference game with one against a bottom half SEC or ACC team every year for every PAC-12 team. If our lower tier teams are truly stronger, we should pick up wins in 75% of those games, counting as power-5 wins, and burnishing the PAC-12's rep and enhancing bowl/playoff chances. Oregon St-Syracuse! WSU-Duke! UCLA-South Carolina! Stanford should replace Notre Dame on their yearly schedule with Vanderbilt. Imagine all those wins...

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A watershed moment in the history of Pac 12 football happened a little more than a year ago. One of the best California high school quarterbacks of the last decade - Bryce Young - broke his commitment to USC and decided to go to Alabama. His cross town rival - D.J. Uiagelelei - also one of the best quarterbacks of the last decade - never even sniffed a team from the Pac 12 and went straight to Clemson.

If those young men from the Southland had played 15 years earlier, Pete Carroll most certainly would have nabbed one of them, and the other one would have headed for Seattle or Eugene. There may be no going back to the glory days of the conference, and I am okay with that. It means that teams in the middle like Cal have a chance to steal a win or two from the tog dogs, as happened in 2018. It makes you appreciate how that 2003 win that Can got against Pete Carroll was more of a fluke than anything. And the presence of Tedford at this best, how big of a fluke was that?

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Nice article. I was with you all the way up to Pac 12 "after dark". I hate late college games.

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I agree that I don't need the Pac12 to be a football factory. I don't want only SC to win each year. I don't want the loss of scholar athleticism. I don't want or expect our schools to become even more hostage to football. Give me a top tier university, with a good and competitive team, any day. I myself don't need anything more than a great Cal-UCLA game. I don't need more than seeing Cal beat UW again and again. I honestly don't give a crap about Alabama or Ohio State or Clemson. The South has done and continues to do it's sins and outrages against their black and brown citizens and yet boasts their talent on their football teams without so much as a guilt trip. Not that the Pac12 schools aren't without a troubled history, but it is far easier for me to root for Oregon or WA or of course Cal than it is for an SEC school. I'm biased for academic excellence, quality of life, social and political and environmental justice, and so on, which is generally easier to get out West than among the schools were football is everything. Give me the Pac12, with all it's warts, any day. And let those other schools be football factories and deny their citizens the right to vote or protest.

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Dykes' quote is ridiculous. Couldn't play/coach defense to save his life.

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You should be against expanding the playoffs.

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Amen Nick.

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The one major point I do agree with is that the Pac-12 should campaign to get automatic bids to the playoff for all major conferences. The truth is that with so few non-conference games in college football, you don't really know which conference was the strongest in any given year. Fairness would seem to demand that every conference should get a shot at the big prize.

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Nice article, Nick. You made some good points that I hadnt really thought much about (I grew up with an east coast bias before Cal, and some of that is still engrained in me), i.e. when you take those several few blue bloods out of the mix it's an entirely different story than the dominant media narrative. Don't these people know about truncated mean?

I would probably include Florida State (and maybe Miami), without knowing their budgets or revenue offhand, among the ACC not named.

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