The Cougar That Came For Dinner
The Mountain West family invited the Wolves into their home, set the table for dinner, and then got eaten one by one, themselves. In a best-case scenario, (and an NCAA-goes-away, SuperConference case scenario) what could the future make up of the Pac-12 look like?
There's a certain subset of people that loves a good revenge story.
I think this is because revenge stories tend to flex a popular idea that an Earthly force, something overt and proximate, something good we can root for in an otherwise wholly evil and meaningless world, has righted other Earthly wrongs. Justice is really just thinly-coded retribution, which feels emotionally rewarding when it's witnessed before our very eyes.
If you're one of these retribution junkies, or if you're a Washington State or Oregon State fan, or if you simply love irony, college football produced a doozy of a vengeance fable for you this past week.
The Cougars and Beavers resurrected their Cherished Conference Brand and raided four schools from the Mountain West this past week. One of the two even went out and, as underdogs, beat their rival, one of the group of programs who "stabbed them in the back," as the phraseology goes in the coffee shops and message boards of Corvallis and Pullman, by secretly leaving the Pac-12 vessel before it bubbled under.
This new Pac-12 - the Franken-12 - needs to add at least two more teams to be recognized by the NCAA as an FBS conference and to potentially have a champion that earns an automatic bid to future iterations of the CFP.
It was indeed college football that produced this drama for you, not college sports. Unnamed sources dripped out to the Wilners and Canzanos of the world the night before the official announcement that the six schools are committed to being, "players in major college athletics, and offering strength in the one sport that counts — football."
Offering strength seems optimistic. And in spite of throwing it in their old rivals' faces on Apple Cup / Civil War weekend, there is more work to be done even to prove viability, let alone future success.
Regardless, there looks to be at least some future for the nominal Pac-12.
Below we pose 7 questions that could affect what that future looks like, and take a stab at determining who could eventually end up in a future, best-case scenario Pac-12.
1. How Is The Pac-12 "Back"? The Schools Are Still Locked Out Of The Upper Echelon Of College Sports And Won't Make Nearly As Much As Their Former Conference-Mates Are Earning
I believe this to be mostly true, but that doesn't mean that what went down isn't meaningful, or that the Pac-12 will not eventually be back in a literal form.
