Pac-12's demise part of college sports 'carnage' that seems to have no foreseeable end

LAS VEGAS — In what former Stanford coach Jerod Haase describes as the “carnage” of today’s college sports, the Pac-12 is imploding, major conferences are going national and players jump in and out of the transfer portal to follow NIL dollars every offseason.

“Everybody’s a free agent,” UCLA coach Mick Cronin says. “That’s just the way it is.”

So what’s next? Cronin, as vocally upset about the Pac-12’s impending implosion as any of the league’s 12 coaches have been this season, says maybe even the long-standard four-year eligibility maximum gets tossed into the wrecking bin.

That way, a player deemed more valuable in college than the NBA — a dominant but not mobile center, for example — can cash in for a fifth season of college.

Maybe a sixth. Or even a seventh. Or forever.

Who’s stopping the train now?

“If you’d have met me five years ago and I told you all this was going on, you would have said `There’s no way — you’re not in the Big Ten, there’s not collectives recruiting and paying players, and … every time we have a ruling (regarding the NCAA) the court says, `You can’t have that,’ “ Cronin said.

“So here’s what I got for you. (Oregon center) N’Faly Dante is making NIL money. Let’s just assume it’s better than what he can make professionally next year. He should get an attorney and he should get an injunction so he can keep playing college. Because we lose every other case, the NCAA.

“You’re looking at me like `you’re crazy.’ But why wouldn’t he do that? Because we’ve taken away his right to make a living.”

“I bet he would win. I mean, every other case wins. The whole thing is nuts.”

To understand how nutty the part about the Pac-12 is requires going no further than looking at its San Francisco Bay Area schools.

California and Stanford, both within an hour drive of the Pacific Ocean, are moving to the Atlantic Coast Conference, subjecting their basketball players to what might be twice-monthly trips across the country — while taking classes at two of the top universities in the world.

Not to mention that there aren’t exactly decades of historical rivalries between the Bay Area schools and Duke, North Carolina or say, Pitt and Miami. Maybe some academic ties but none athletically and certainly not geographically.

“It’s a little bit surreal to think that the Pac-12 is coming to an end,” Haase said Wednesday after a first-round game, before he was fired a day later. “Sad is probably the best description. Times are changing so fast in college athletics. And as we know, the realignment with all the schools, the advent of NIL, the number of transfers, I think the next few years it will continue to change.

“It’s sad and disappointing. But the reality is it’s part of the carnage that’s going on all across the landscape right now. And at the end of the day everybody’s going to need to move forward and reinvent themselves a little bit.”

Cronin said he believes NCAA president Charlie Baker is trying to push back against the wave of momentum, so far with little success.

“He’s doing everything he can to save college sports. Literally everything he can,” Cronin said. “And all you got to do is look at what happened to this great conference, and realize it can happen to all of college sports.”

Cronin says he was out on the golf course in June 2022 when it started happening to the Pac-12. The course didn’t allow cellphones, so Cronin said a messenger was sent out in a golf cart to tell Cronin that UCLA was headed to the Big Ten along with USC.

That was the first blow, and the rest of the story is pretty well known by now: Oregon and Washington opted to join the Los Angeles schools in the Big Ten early last August, prompting Arizona to join Colorado, Utah and ASU in the Big 12. Then Stanford and Cal found distant refuge in the ACC, leaving Washington State and Oregon State without a home, or something that for now they can just call the “Pac-2.”

“It’ a shame that we’re in the position that we’re in, to be quite honest,” OSU coach Wayne Tinkle said, reluctantly commenting on his program’s fate after the Beavers’ season ended in a first-round loss Wednesday. “it’s a damn shame. We say damn this, damn that, because of beaver dams. It’s a damn shame. But it is what it is.”

That’s pretty much what everyone has been saying all season around the conference: Coaches, administrators, broadcasters and even the players, who aren’t old enough to have seen the Kareem Abdul-Jabbars, Bill Waltons, Sean Elliotts, Jason Kidds, Gary Paytons who have starred over the decades.

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Some, like Arizona point guard Kylan Boswell, were just toddlers when Lute Olson coached his final game for the Wildcats in 2007.

But the players are old enough to know that the Pac-12 put six players into the first round of the NBA Draft in 2017 and 2020, with four in 2021, three in 2022 and another, UCLA’s Jaime Jaquez, last season.

Good players, good rivalries, good times, which in turn attracted more good players.

USC center Joshua Morgan was one of them, even as he wasn’t initially deemed good enough, starting his career as a freshman at Long Beach State before he signed with Trojans coach Andy Enfield as a sophomore.

Now his career is ending just as the conference appears to be.

“It is a bummer,” Morgan said. “When I came here, the Pac-12 was my favorite conference. I always wanted to come to a Pac-12 school. … It’s definitely bittersweet. I am happy I was able to play in the last Pac-12 Tournament.”

Is it the last? OSU and WSU are keeping the name alive, at least for now. Each has agreed to play a Mountain West football schedule and a West Coast Conference basketball schedule next season. They have to find six other schools within two years to fully revive the league, since the NCAA allows conferences a two-year grace period to reach at least eight schools in the event of realignment.

It’s a sore subject, of course, for Tinkle, who had the following exchange with a reporter after the Beavers finished their season Wednesday.

Question: “This is your last-ever Pac-12 game. Any thoughts?”

Tinkle: “For the next couple of years.”

Question: “You know what I mean.”

Tinkle: “I know.”

Tinkle said he didn’t want to think about it at the time, preferring to celebrate the positives, and he was hardly alone. Cal coach Mark Madsen, a former standout forward at Stanford, said he “went through all the emotion” earlier in the year when he learned of it, but otherwise spoke only of “great memories” and schools that will “blaze a new path” after the Pac-12 dissolves.

Besides, at this point, what can anybody say? It’s already been said.

“It’s a historic year and not one that everyone wants to talk about,” Utah coach Craig Smith said.

In what became a farewell speech of sorts after he was fired on Thursday following Stanford’s loss to Washington State, Haase spoke of an “inflection point” for Stanford and college sports in general.

It’s “the big picture stuff of the transfer portal, undergrad transfers, graduate transfers, NIL, the future moving forward with the changes in conferences, and … revenue sharing and employee status and things like that,” Haase said. “There’s so many big changes, big decisions that are going on right now. I believe Stanford is a place of great ingenuity and creativity and desire to lead.

“But the truth is a lot of these are hard decisions, especially when you value the scholar-athlete and you value the experience, you value the development of the players on and off the court. They’re not easy conversations, and there’s not a lot of easy solutions. But I do believe it’s an inflection point.”

Haase said he believed that Stanford and the boss who just fired him, Stanford AD Bernard Muir, would make thoughtful decisions to make sure things move in the right direction.

Somehow.

“I guess my answer is I believe it’s possible,” Haase said. “I don’t think it’s going to be easy, but I think it’s full of opportunity, for sure. And I would say those things for any university.”