07-16-2023, 02:20 PM
College football conference realignment timeline: 124 years of drama, money and bitterness - The Athletic
A few tid-bits on the Pac 12
Dec. 14, 1957: More than 60 years before the Pac-12’s current fight for survival, its predecessor, the Pacific Coast Conference, did in fact implode, following a series of slush-fund scandals involving booster clubs (a 1950s version of NIL collectives) at Washington, USC, UCLA and Cal. The two L.A. schools and Cal withdrew from the league, and the conference itself disbanded within a year.
“They couldn’t take it,” longtime Washington State coach Babe Hollingbery said of the three defectors. “Making rules and breaking them — then hollering ‘murder’ and refusing to take the consequences. Is that the American collegiate way? Of course not.”
It did not take long for the four cheaters and Stanford to join forces and form what would soon become the Pac-8 with the additions of Washington State, Oregon and Oregon State. Left in the dust: Poor Idaho, a PCC member since 1922.
Dec. 13, 1976: The Pac-8 invites WAC members Arizona and Arizona State, culminating a years-long process in which first ASU, then a football power under Frank Kush, had to be sold on the move, and then two Pac-8 holdouts needed an 11th-hour push to approve the invites.
In a 2018 account to the Mercury News, John Sandbrook, UCLA’s assistant chancellor at the time, described a dramatic final meeting in San Francisco where the presidents of Stanford and Washington shocked the room in declaring they would vote “no” on the Arizona schools. At which point USC president John Hubbard “erupted” and “stated, loudly,” that if that happened, “then USC would announce to the assembled press downstairs that … it would be withdrawing immediately as a member of the Pac-8.”
Stanford and Washington changed their minds.
A few tid-bits on the Pac 12
Dec. 14, 1957: More than 60 years before the Pac-12’s current fight for survival, its predecessor, the Pacific Coast Conference, did in fact implode, following a series of slush-fund scandals involving booster clubs (a 1950s version of NIL collectives) at Washington, USC, UCLA and Cal. The two L.A. schools and Cal withdrew from the league, and the conference itself disbanded within a year.
“They couldn’t take it,” longtime Washington State coach Babe Hollingbery said of the three defectors. “Making rules and breaking them — then hollering ‘murder’ and refusing to take the consequences. Is that the American collegiate way? Of course not.”
It did not take long for the four cheaters and Stanford to join forces and form what would soon become the Pac-8 with the additions of Washington State, Oregon and Oregon State. Left in the dust: Poor Idaho, a PCC member since 1922.
Dec. 13, 1976: The Pac-8 invites WAC members Arizona and Arizona State, culminating a years-long process in which first ASU, then a football power under Frank Kush, had to be sold on the move, and then two Pac-8 holdouts needed an 11th-hour push to approve the invites.
In a 2018 account to the Mercury News, John Sandbrook, UCLA’s assistant chancellor at the time, described a dramatic final meeting in San Francisco where the presidents of Stanford and Washington shocked the room in declaring they would vote “no” on the Arizona schools. At which point USC president John Hubbard “erupted” and “stated, loudly,” that if that happened, “then USC would announce to the assembled press downstairs that … it would be withdrawing immediately as a member of the Pac-8.”
Stanford and Washington changed their minds.
