Wowsa. Yesterday's loss by Stanford to Hawaii? You lose to the lower end of the Mountain West....?

Cal's NIL money has dried up, thus their best players transferred out, and we all know the pathetic state of Beavis and those who Coug-it. Only Arizona State has prospered from the split, and the predictions are they will challenge the Big-12 again.

But damn...Oregon State, Washington State, 'Furd, and Cal? We left just in time...

Football only lens.

Early relative returns on everyone aside from UO and ASU weren’t exactly stellar in year one. Things should be looking relatively up for Utah and UW in year 2, but is anyone else looking remotely good? I don’t mean passable, but good as in having a shot at 9-10 wins? USC had a great recruiting class, but we’re waiting to see if their coach survives the year. Everyone else seems to be hoping for 7 wins on the upside.

Cal has been floundering for the better part of the last twenty years. They don't invest in football (NIL aside) and that's what they get. It's hard to get a real gage of how good Justin Wilcox actually is as a coach when he doesn't have any support from his university and alumni base.

As for Stanford.... David Shaw got out at the right time. Like Cal they don't have the money being infused into the program, especially since they give a real Ivy League vibe where they'd rather not have scholarship sports entirely. They can use the portal, they can't remain student athletes who want to graduate and then get a master's degree, they can't get grad transfers... They are stuck and unlike Cal I don't even see how an infusion of money from donors would even help them.

Oregon State and Washington State should have leveraged everything in their power to join the Big 12. Even if it was about cutting a deal with former Pac-12 members to let the conference dissolve but levage some of that money into a safety net for the two schools that didn't have a landing place.

They didn't do that and then pillaged the only conference that helped them out, the Mountain West. They destroyed any sympathy they had from being left out of the death of the pac-12.

The reality is they had leverage to get themselves into the Big 12 or ACC. They could have said... Hey former members we need a conference and you want at least some of your money from the Pac-12. Let us have some extra money and land somewhere and you'll all get something. Don't agree then we'll stay independent with a Pac-12 badge and you'll get nothing.

Reverse merger with the MW wouldn't have been bad but that didn't happen. Instead pillaging the MW to remake a slightly better version of it looks pathetic.

They made their bed and there will be no sympathy for their struggles and the failures. They choose the worse option repeatedly.

I expect both Cal and Stan will kill football program before too long. Paying athletes goes against school's ideology.

As for the Pac(S)8, they have made themselves all but irrelevant. Fresno St got hammered by Kansas?

Those 4 teams OSU, WSU, Cal & Stan were seldom more than mediocre. They each had a season or two of success but little effort to grow or sustain it.

They've earned their current position.

11 minutes ago, David Marsh said:

Oregon State and Washington State should have leveraged everything in their power to join the Big 12.

They were not wanted, as everyone in the Big-12 would take a media split cut by adding them.

They were massively overpaid by the Pac-12 for decades...

1 minute ago, DanLduck said:

Stan were seldom more than mediocre.

Stanford was a power from 2008-2016

Harbaugh and Shaw were darn good making them relevant.

3 minutes ago, Charles Fischer said:

They were not wanted, as everyone in the Big-12 would take a media split cut by adding them.

They were massively overpaid by the Pac-12 for decades...

They could have said they'd take a media cut and earn their way to full membership. But that would require an honest evaluation of their own programs which didn't happen.

If they were honest with themselves about their worth they would have joined the Mountain West by now instead of trying to rebuild a conference.

They have some creative options if they were honest with themselves but they have insisted on making all the worst decisions.

Stay independent and use that pac-12 cash to invest into football. Get some high potential coaches and show they are serious in football. That would help get the NIL collectives rolling and then do everything in their power to make good bowl games or the playoff (though unlikely).

Instead the Beaver's hired Bray, Smith's DC, and didn't have any real depth in the roster and the whole thing fell apart.

Could they have gotten anyone better? Maybe but that promotion seemed to happen so fast they didn't seem to care to try.

Would any serious coach actually want to take the OSU job? Not with the way they were running the program and it's lack of support and no conference.

But maybe.... Maybe they could have held onto Smith with a realistic major bonus and a well laidout plan for the future.

Because the program Smith built at OSU would dominate the MW conference and would have been in the conversation of being one of those G5 teams that could potentially get a playoff spot. They probably wouldn't have gotten it still... But the narrative around the program is COMPLETELY different at that point.

So maybe they can make a crazy deal with the Big 12 or ACC. But instead they went the route of keeping all the Pac-12 money and stabbing the MW in the back.

Now in the New Pac-12 they aren't going to be the dominant team. That goes to Boise State.

OSU might not even be the second or third best team either. They will be in the middle of a crap conference of their own making.

That's lack of vision and a failure. That's on OSU's administration.

My comments that they should have tried to get into the Big 12 isn't to say the Big 12 would take them as they were.... They weren't that desirable. The Bug 12 would be adding two mediocre teams to their already mediocre conference that's a non-starter, there's no value there.

But it's my observation that OSU (and WSU) didn't even seem to try. They stayed their mediocre course and said "this is fine" and they get the bed they made.

They had a strange opportunity to take a large chunk of money that had fallen in their laps (rightly or unrightly) and have made all the worst decisions as to what to do with it.

6 minutes ago, David Marsh said:

If they were honest with themselves about their worth they would have joined the Mountain West by now instead of trying to rebuild a conference.

They could not steal 300 million from the departing ten other Pac-12 members if they left and reverse-merged with the Mountain West.

They had to retain the name for the theft...

They have settled into where they belong...

Why didn’t they try and give that $300M to the BIG-12 as a buy in. If that didn’t work, could they have offered to split it equally with the MW to merge under the PAC-12 name to create the top G5 league?

Now they have no future. The money is a very short term fix, but when that runs out, they have nothing.