What does the defection of UCLA and USC mean for the future of Pac-12 women's basketball?
A look at the various scenarios and what they could mean for women's basketball fans.
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Last summer, the Big 12 was in turmoil. Its two biggest money-makers, Oklahoma and Texas, announced that they would be leaving for the SEC. At the time, rampant speculation was that the Pac-12 would choose to expand, picking off some of the more desirable schools from the reeling Big 12.
On Aug. 26, 2021, the Pac-12 issued a statement stating that the conference would “not pursue expansion of our membership at this time.” The statement went on to say that this was based on the “cohesiveness” of the 12 universities. That decision and the about-face of two of those universities may have direct consequences for the future existence of the league.
Last Thursday’s announcement by UCLA and USC that they would be departing from the Pac-12 to join the Big Ten–a league located primarily in the Eastern Time Zone–makes that decision by the other 10 chancellors, presidents, and athletic directors look even more questionable in hindsight.
Rather than thoughtfully expand, perhaps bringing in a few more desirable media markets, the Pac-12 chose to enter an “Alliance” with the Big Ten and ACC–-a move that was ridiculed as not worth the paper it was not written on even at the time. There was no formal legal agreement among the leagues; it was simply platitudes and press releases.
It appears that the Big Ten was already in talks with UCLA and USC even as it entered its “alliance” with the Pac-12. With the Pac-12 losing its two biggest money-producers from a media standpoint, it would seem that the Big 12 now holds the cards and can determine whether the Pac-12 continues to exist at all based on whether it throws a lifeline to some of the remaining Pac-12 teams.
The Pac-12 issued two statements after the announcement of the Los Angeles schools. The first expressed surprise at the decision, which is a concern in and of itself since the negotiations have reportedly been underway for a year. The second finally “authorized” the conference to try to expand in what looks very much like closing the barn door after the horse is running in the field.
The main driver of expansion is and always has been football and its media rights. Some reports say that Fox was key in convincing the Bruins and Trojans to abandon the conference they were founding members of. Others say it was USC that drove the bus. Regardless of who was the moving force, most of the people who deal with the negative repercussions of these decisions will not be football players, wealthy sports administrators, or network bigwigs. They will be athletes in the “non-revenue” sports, including women’s basketball.
What are the potential ramifications for women’s basketball of the shattering of the Pac-12?
For USC and UCLA
The Big Ten is a league in which one school has dominated women’s basketball for a while. That school is Maryland.
The Terrapins have won the regular-season championship, the conference championship, or both almost every year since they joined the Big Ten in 2014. They took the regular-season title in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2021. The tournament crown was theirs in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020, and 2021. While the Big Ten was certainly stronger last season, the Terrapins have paced the league for almost a decade.
UCLA and USC have been competing in a league that has sent at least one representative to the Final Four 12 times since 2008. Since the tournament was not held in 2020, that amounts to the league missing the Final Four just twice over that period.
While most of those appearances have been by Stanford, the Cardinal have by no means been the only team to represent the Pac-12 over the past 15 years. California, Washington, Oregon, Oregon State, and Arizona have all made runs to the final weekend of Division I women’s basketball. On two occasions since 2008, half of the Final Four came from the Pac-12, and the 2021 national title game featured two teams from the league.
UCLA will likely be competitive wherever it plays. The Bruins recruit nationally and internationally. They are welcoming in the No. 1 class in the country this year. However, competitive and dominant are not the same things.
In the Pac-12, the Bruins have not been able to get over the hump despite regularly having some of the league’s best talent. They have not won a conference tournament championship since 2006 and have not won the regular-season crown since 1999. In the NCAA Tournament, they are regular competitors but seldom truly a threat, advancing beyond the Sweet Sixteen only twice in program history, and just once in the 21st century. They have never been to a Final Four.
With Maryland being dominant in the Big Ten for so long and a few teams now rising to threaten the Terrapins, it’s unlikely that the Bruins fare any better in the Big Ten. They will be good, but they will not be able to surpass the best in the league.
As for USC, its problem has been retaining talent. The Women of Troy tend to recruit more regionally than their cross-town rivals, but they get some very good players from their region. What they have difficulty doing is keeping those players around, regardless of who the coach is.
The end of the 2021-22 season once again saw some of the top players at USC enter the transfer portal. In 2019, it was Minyon Moore who left for Oregon. In 2021, Endyia Rogers jumped ship, also choosing to play for the Ducks. This year, it was Jordyn Jenkins, Alissa Pili, and Angel Jackson.
If the Women of Troy struggle to keep players without the added pressure of traveling across the country regularly for conference games, do they have much hope of keeping them when the players are trying to juggle that travel, class, and other commitments?
That is the biggest issue for the two LA teams. The amount of travel that will be required in the Big Ten will be extreme. The nearest Big Ten school is Nebraska. Lincoln lies just shy of 1,500 miles from LA.
Like the Pac-12, the Big Ten usually holds its women’s conference games on Friday and Sunday. However, the Pac-12 uses the concept of travel partners. The farthest a team has to travel between opponents on a single weekend is during the Mountain road trip, which requires a flight between Salt Lake City, Utah and Boulder, Colo. In most cases, a team flies into the city of one opponent, then either stays within the same metropolitan area or busses as little as 90 miles to the weekend’s second opponent.
An example of a Big Ten schedule is the one Wisconsin played in 2021-22. The Badgers were scheduled to play Indiana and Purdue back-to-back, but the games were six days apart. The luxury of staying in a single state for the entire weekend just didn’t exist. One week, Wisconsin played Minnesota in Madison, then had to play Rutgers in New Jersey two days later.
Maryland had similar stretches. From February 9-20, the Terrapins hosted Wisconsin, then traveled to Iowa. They then returned home to play Ohio State followed by a road game at Michigan.
With UCLA and USC at least 1,500 miles from every other school in the conference, the idea that travel can be balanced with education and the “health and safety” concerns schools claim to have is questionable. The Big Ten has reportedly assured the LA schools that they can be “creative” with conference scheduling for the Olympic sports, but it’s difficult to see how creativity can overcome the realities of extreme distance for athletes who are supposed to be attending school.
For the remaining 10 teams
The Pac-12/10/xx would retain most of its powerful women’s basketball teams if the conference decides to hang together, but there’s no guarantee that this will happen or that it’s in the best interests of individual schools to do so.
Stick together and expand
The question of expanding isn’t just about which schools to invite. It’s also about how many and whether it even makes financial sense to try to maintain the league without its biggest media market. While the 10 remaining schools have issued a statement indicating that this is the chosen path, UCLA and USC were publicly on board with the league even as they were negotiating with the Big Ten and the networks to leave. Adding the debacle of the Alliance only makes the facts more apparent. Taking anything at face value in a world ruled by football money is risky.
Should it play out that way, though, the Pac-12 would still be a formidable women’s basketball conference. All of the teams that have made a Final Four over the past 15 years would remain.
The remaining teams also have some of the best recruiting classes in the nation flowing to their campuses. Those classes rarely depend on the Los Angeles market, so the loss of Los Angeles as a recruiting ground is not a huge problem. Stanford, Arizona, Oregon, and Oregon State all recruit on a national and international level, pulling in McDonald’s All-Americans all the way from the East Coast.
The major question would be who would be added to the league. That will be answered by football, not women’s basketball, but there are some intriguing teams among the possibilities.
One possibility is UNLV. The league already has strong ties to the Las Vegas area where it holds its football championship game and both basketball tournaments. The Lady Rebels were an NCAA Tournament team last season under the guidance of Stanford alumna Lindy La Rocque.
There are teams that would be great additions to women’s basketball but would not get the invite because they do not bring the desired impact in football. Chief among those is Gonzaga. The Bulldogs do not even offer football, so their inclusion in the Pac-12 would seem to be dead in the water.
South Dakota and South Dakota State, perennial winners at the mid-major level, would be suitable replacements in women’s basketball. The problem for both is that they are in the Football Championship Subdivision, the football division that includes smaller schools. That does not bode well for their inclusion, either.
Some schools that might be invited based on football profiles would not have a positive impact on women’s basketball. Among those are Boise State, San Diego State, and Fresno State. All three would be poor replacements for UCLA and USC if the Pac-12 is going to remain a strong women’s basketball conference, although SDSU would add a potentially lucrative Southern California foothold.
The Pac-12 also has the option of trying to lure away some members of the Big 12. BYU is set to join that league, but its ties to Utah and history with many other Pac-12 teams might convince the Cougars to renege on that commitment. With the absence of at least two of the California teams, what was believed to be an objection to admitting religious schools into the conference may no longer apply.
Look out for yourselves
The problem with trying to lure Big 12 teams is that some of the remaining Pac-12 teams may think it’s in their interests to join the Big 12 rather than stick with their existing league. This could be particularly attractive to Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and Arizona State.
On Tuesday, July 5, Dennis Dodd of CBS reported that the Big 12 is in “deep discussions” to add at least those four schools. Dodd indicated that the Big 12 may also be trying to get Oregon and Washington. That would create an 18-team league, which would be the largest in college sports.
There are good reasons for the four schools that are being referred to as the “Four Corners schools” to look East. For the Arizona schools, prior to joining the Pac-10 in 1978, their conference affiliations were almost always with schools in New Mexico and Texas. That may make more sense now with the loss of the LA markets. Joining a league that has teams in Texas may seem like a better bet for football recruiting.
It is also likely that Arizona and Arizona State remain together regardless of what the decision is. The Arizona Board of Regents has required the two teams to play in the same conference for decades. When the two were admitted to the Pac-10, Arizona was the school with the initial desire to leave the old WAC–a decision based on academics as much as athletics. The Wildcats had to convince the Sun Devils to come along in order to satisfy the demands of ABOR.
Utah may lean towards the Big 12 to join its traditional rival, BYU. The two were in the same conference until the Utes opted to leave for the Pac-12. Joining a league with the Cougars could be very attractive, but would it offer the Big 12 enough bang for its buck to take in a second team from the same basic metropolitan area?
As for Colorado, they were a member of the Big 12 until they joined the Pac-12 in 2011. Going back and rekindling old rivalries would not be the worst thing for the Buffaloes.
Oregon and Washington would undoubtedly prefer the money that comes with a move to the Big Ten. However, the Big Ten doesn’t seem to be interested at the present as they try to lure Notre Dame into the fold.
Oregonian columnist John Canzano wrote that Oregon and Washington would not bring in enough revenue to make up for what they would get from the Big Ten. However, the addition of those two West Coast teams might help with the “creative scheduling” that the Big Ten promised the LA schools in Olympic sports.
On the women’s basketball side, a move by Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah to the Big 12 could be a good thing for the sport. The addition of Oregon would be even better, and UW could potentially add another quality team.
The Ducks have been a West Coast power for the better part of a decade. Arizona has risen to the status of national power both on the court and on the recruiting trail. Two different current Big 12 teams have courted Adia Barnes in the past few years. ASU was a consistent NCAA Tournament team until the last few years and looks to rebound with the addition of former McDonald’s All-American Treasure Hunt. Utah always has exciting offense, and CU is a great defensive program. The Huskies are still trying to recover from a few down years but have been a Final Four team in the recent past.
Seeing those teams taking on the likes of Baylor, Iowa State, BYU, UCF, and Kansas State would be exciting for women’s basketball fans. It would also mean that the Pac-12 teams would likely have more national exposure on ESPN than they currently do on the Pac-12 Networks.
The final option involving the Pac-12 and the Big 12 is that they merge in their entirety. That would keep the great women’s basketball rivalries of the Pac-12 intact. It would be an incredibly strong women’s basketball league. It would also be extremely unwieldy with a total of 22 teams ranging in location from Seattle to Tempe to Orlando to Morgantown.
Most of the options leave some great women’s basketball programs floating around. What happens to Stanford? What happens to Oregon State? Stanford could conceivably try to go independent, but do they have the national profile in football to do that? Oregon State and Washington State could be the big losers if the conference doesn’t hold together as they seem the least likely to get picked up by another major conference.
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Seems to me that Hawai'i would be a logical expansion team. That's about as "Pacific" as you can get. Some of these others are kind of a reach.