Greg Hansen: Arizona Wildcats can exhale after nearly joining ranks of Pac-12 pariahs

These are the unlikely basketball teams that have looted and pillaged Pac-12 basketball programs this year:

Texas Southern.

Kent State.

Santa Clara (not Santa Claus).

Hawaii.

Indiana State.

Seattle.

Montana State.

Belmont.

Yes, Belmont. The Belmont Bruins beat the once-grand UCLA Bruins last week at Pauley Pavilion.

Arizona avoided membership in the general disorder of Pac-12 basketball by, ahem, beating UC Davis 70-68 on Saturday. It was such a close escape that UA historians — well, at least me — searched the record books for a more embarrassing regular-season home loss.

How about UT-Pan American winning at McKale Center in December 1983? That was so long ago that Pan American merged with UT-Brownsville and is now known as UT-Rio Grande Valley.

Too bad UTRGV didn’t schedule the Cal Bears this year.

This is the worst Pac-12 basketball pre-conference season since 2011-12, when the league went 0-12 against Top 25 teams, failed to win an NCAA Tournament game and lost to, among others, Fairfield, Middle Tennessee State, Idaho, Cal Riverside, UNC Asheville, Weber State and Harvard.

Yes, Harvard beat Utah in December 2011

That was the season the Pac-12 was so bad that regular season league champion Washington was not admitted to the NCAA Tournament field.

Is this year worse? Stay tuned. Fans in the league have not tuned in. Through games of Friday, the Pac-12 was averaging 47 percent capacity at home games, or 5,541 fans per game — not counting Arizona’s McKale Center totals.

And it’s not just bad basketball by the home team. It is, you have surely noticed, bad basketball by opposing teams.

The Pac-12 has played 26 home games against those from small California precincts: UC Davis, Cal State Northridge, Cal State Fullerton and everybody but UC Elmo.

There is, however, a danger of overreacting to this tepid preseason. I mean, the Pac-12, Pac-10 and Pac-8 have never been a basketball league. For 20 years, UCLA won. Nobody else did.

About that time, Oregon had the “Kamikaze Kids” for a year or two, but the Ducks of the 1970s never finished in the AP Top 25 or won an NCAA Tournament game.

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USC? It has played in three Sweet 16s in the last 57 years.

When UCLA waned, Oregon State and Arizona took charge. Then the Beavers disappeared.

Stanford was as good as anybody for a decade. Then? Kaput.

Arizona State was better in the ’60s than it has been since.

Other than UCLA and Arizona, the only other school with a basketball tradition is Utah. And now the Utes are in a third straight season of discontent and have won but three NCAA Tournament games in 14 seasons.

Oregon? Not yet. Let’s wait another five years to see if the Ducks are more than a fad created by some of Nike’s silly money.

What many never realized was that when Lute Olson commandeered the league from 1985-2005, it never truly challenged the ACC or Big Ten for superiority.

When Olson’s 1988 team seized the No. 1 ranking, finished 35-3 and played in the Final Four, the league was at its absolute worst, coming off a five-year period in which the Pac-10 went 4-12 in the NCAA Tournament.

The Pac-10 of ’88 had a 52.3 winning percentage in pre-conference games. Two years earlier it had a record low 52.2 percentage.

The league has never been close to that percentage again. Even this year, it’s at 62 percent.

When UCLA and Arizona aren’t good, the league has no coast-to-coast credibility. Washington State was terrific for two years, 2007 and 2008, and nobody noticed. Arizona State put James Harden in uniform for two years, and the Sun Devils won a single NCAA Tournament game.

Oregon State, which has been invisible since 1990, even hired the brother-in-law of the president of the United States. How’d that go? The Beavers went 39-69 in conference games.

As soon as Sean Miller was hired in 2009, he became the face of the league. He still is. He is likely to return to prominence atop a not-so-blessed conference by this time next year.

The worst season ever of Pac-10/12 basketball was 1984-85. That year the conference went 45-42 (or 52 percent) in the lead-up to league play. The losses were against Portland, Fordham, Richmond, Penn, Lamar and Boston U.

By comparison, the Pac-12 this season has a 62 percent winning percentage at 84-50 (not including Saturday’s two late games). That stacks up with the forgettable 2011-12 season in which the Pac-12 was 83-57 entering league play.

For probably the first time in forever, as Arizona fans scattered into the night Saturday, the topic du jour was Sun Devils basketball. That’s how far the league has slipped.

ASU played No. 1 Kansas in Tempe and it was easy for a Wildcat fan to say “we used to do that all the time.”

But not really.

The only time a No. 1-ranked nonconference team played in Tucson was in December 1952. It was La Salle. It was so long ago that people referred to basketball teams as “quintets.”

La Salle beat Arizona 87-68 at Bear Down Gym that night. You wonder if those old Explorers might be able to get the gang back together, field a quintet and beat a Pac-12 team today.