(06-25-2022 11:29 AM)Section 200 Wrote:  I find it really difficult to be bullish on the Pac - I see them as the 5th conference right now & think it will be hard for them to climb higher. We took our vacation in June in California - wonderful place. Kudos to the NBA & MLB for owning the state in terms of sports teams. Lakers, Golden State, Dodgers, Giants, Padres gear everywhere, on TV in the sports bars, on the mind of Uber drivers. Add in the Mexican National Soccer team & that's a lot of competition not even counting the NFL (Rams won the Super Bowl!)

Ultimately USC, UCLA & Stanford should join the Big 10, Cal should drop sports and that will allow the schools to maximize their value. At a certain point "potential" has to be realized & the fans have seemed to move on. Perhaps the problem is that the California Pac schools are just too elite for the t-shirt fans to care about them. Almost every Ohio student can go to Ohio State, even if they have to go to a branch campus for a year or 2 before transferring. OSU alumni are everywhere. There is essentially no path to UCLA or Cal for the vast majority of California kids, even celebrities have to cheat to get their kids into USC & Stanford is basically Harvard for admissions. Hard to form a bond with one of these schools if all of the folks you know have no chance to attend.

Yet, the school with the most T-shirt fans of them all is Notre Dame, which is an elite school that 99-plus percent of their fans and kids would never have a chance of getting into, as well. Anyone that thinks that elite schools somehow don’t bond with people always seem to forget ND.

I’ll also just say that it’s patently ridiculous that the flagship university of the largest state in the country would drop sports. No one should apologize for having high academic standards while also competing in top level sports.