LAS VEGAS — To an East Coast child you beamed through the television as exotica, as a living being downright mystical with your colors and your sunlight and your willingness to throw passes before others even bothered. You decorated New Year’s Days with your representatives and your cleverness and your pizazz and your habit of winning Rose Bowls. You became part of the American mind-set even to those 2,500 miles away and even when 2,500 miles were longer than 2,500 miles are nowadays. You always looked like you had more fun and less fret.
Now you’re going to die with one final game on a Friday night in a spaceship NFL stadium near Egypt and Paris and Italian fountains and New York, New York. You will die, Pac-12 football, across the way from a sign shouting about the Blue Man Group, leaving behind plenty of blue men and women. You’re dying 108 years after you hatched in a hotel in Portland, Ore., and 55 years after you started dubbing yourself “Pac,” burrowing into our addled brains with “Pac-8” and then “Pac-10” and then “Pac-12.”
You’re dying of a common affliction known as television, and you’re dying in part because of your own wonder: your peerless collection of college towns and metropolises and vistas and mountains and lakes and bays and evergreens and barking seals and cactuses. You always conducted your football theatre in a region with more of a varied life than the rest of us, and maybe that is what killed you. People didn’t sit down enough to watch you on television frequently enough — they were too busy hiking or whatever — so that television from elsewhere could come and pick you clean.
The southern and eastern and midwestern conferences with their television deals have plundered your Arizonas and your Rockies and your Angelenos and your Pacific Northwest until your 12 became an abandoned two — Oregon State, Washington State — and your calendar got drained to one final Pac-12 football game: No. 3 Washington (12-0) vs. No. 5 Oregon (11-1) for one last Pac-12 football championship.
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It should be a doozy and a downer.
Maybe the fact that Oregon, Southern California, UCLA and Washington will flee for the Big Ten while Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah bolt for the Big 12 and Stanford and California run for the ACC epitomizes how air travel has made the country smaller and everything more homogenous so that it’s possible to drive down a boulevard and look at the stores and feel a brief confusion about which particular city this might be. Maybe it was inevitable in a sport that has spent 154 funky years since its funky birth in a New Jersey field, a sport barreling toward super-league snobbery, that a pillar of the football country such as yourself could end up expendable.
That doesn’t mean a former East Coast child won’t mourn some through your last four quarters amid the Brobdingnagian video screens on a desert Friday night. That’s especially apt for anyone who grew up luckily to know your beautiful rainy days in Corvallis and Pullman and Eugene and the sound a mere 54,000 can make at Autzen Stadium and the sight of tailgating on boats at Lake Washington and the sense in Strawberry Canyon and Palo Alto that football might not be the biggest thing in life and that a band might just march onto a field prematurely. Anyone lucky enough to cross the country and to happen into Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum among 92,000 plus UCLA visiting or to see the view from the Salt Lake City press box or to see Boulder at all might prove susceptible to a resentment of changes.
You barreled into such a life with your UCLA blues and Washington purples and Oregon greens and Southern California running backs sweeping right, you impressionist painting of a league, and you filled the senses better than any other conference, so of course we kill you early. So much of your life came soundtracked with the voice of Keith Jackson, which alone flatters an existence. Suddenly one day in the 1980s you sent to the Rose Bowl some Sun Devil maroon and gold, and a decade after that you did it again as those colors came 100 seconds from a national championship, provided the East and Central time zone voters would have granted it.
You conducted your football in air more temperate and less angry than most, and you seethed in your sunshine and drizzle with the lack of respect afforded you. You were always right about that, right down to Alabama finishing ahead of USC in the 1978 Associated Press final poll after USC had clobbered Alabama, 24-14, in Birmingham, or the nation holding a pained discussion about one-loss Florida State making the 2000 Bowl Championship Series final ahead of one-loss Miami when Miami had beaten Florida State — head-to-head! — while almost nobody brought up one-loss Washington, which had beaten Miami.
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You had too many memorable figures to remember all at once, and you came along in your “Pac” days with John McKay, Don James, Terry Donahue, John Robinson. Later you had Pat Tillman, reason enough for any league to exist. Later than that you had David Shaw, further reason enough for any league to exist. Only you could enable a person galumphing around New York on a Saturday night to remain awake after 1 a.m. on a Sunday and watch Reggie Bush zigzagging around the floor of the Coliseum where Babe Didrikson once threw the javelin and ran the hurdles.
You led the country in cosmo.
Then you reached two of the first three editions of this newfangled College Football Playoff starting in 2014, but then you kept elbowing one another and you kept missing out on the four-team construct as the TV money mushroomed. Then you croaked from realignment disease in summer 2022 and summer 2023, with the grim exodus, and now you go and have a crackerjack closing season to close out, with suddenly two of the top five teams and expert quarterbacks strewn all around. Those programs and coaches and many of those players will remain, even the quarterbacks, but they will be melded into elsewhere, and pretty soon those of us who remember will have to bore others with stories of what a stylish anchor of the western land you were and how very much we loved you even if we hailed from what used to be afar.
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