I think that would be an awesome division! Can’t wait until this is official.

did not expect USC and UCLA. I like it though. Pretty damn ideal for us. I don’t wanna wait till 2012! COME ON

that there has been any real discussion on what divisional lines will be. Utah hasn’t even been formally invited to the conference yet.

I think the only thing you can be certain of is that every team will have 1-2 trips to California each year, and that the four California schools will insist that they play eachother each year (my guess would be that LA and Bay are in different division but they are guaranteed to play eachother in interdivision play).

…as a resident of Seattle and former resident (and frequent visitor) of San Francisco. Blast.

…but this would be crushing for the California schools. There’s just so much history between us, in the state and between the schools, that this arrangement would just. not. work. It’s literally unfathomable to me, as a Cal fan, not to play USC and UCLA every year. I’m sure you guys had something like that in the Big 12. The California schools HAVE to play each other. We just HAVE to.

I might be able to accept this division if it included a guarantee that all the California schools played each other every year. Other than that, you’ll hear a LOT of people screaming bloody murder if this goes down.

Now, who’s in SoCal poaching some Trojans for us??
It’d be nice for some of our big sports alums (Kordell & Co, Bieniemy, Billups) to comment, maybe spark some more interest. We need all the help we can get.
So sad that I can’t think of anyone in the last decade who’s made it big.

Sure the revenue concept was attractive. But when the dust settled, apparently Texas was on board with the Pac 16 only so that the Longhorns could make even more money. The truth is Texas owned the old Southwest Conference and now it owns the Big 12. You guys are lucky to get out of Dodge while you could, Nebraska too. Texas has no concern about the viabilty of conference affiliation- the SWC and the Big 12 proves that point.

Let Texas have their own tv network. I just find it completely absurd that the rest of the Big 12 will allow Texas full control over that league. Welcome to a league where loyalty, prestige, and commitment are all trademarks. Huskies and ducks may not like each other, but one thing we all know- we are not a viable entity without commitment to each other. Texas is only in it for themselves and during the 11th hour of negotiating, Texas wouldn’t show their cards. Either they had a bunch of wild cards and wanted all the Pac 16 revenue + their own tv network OR they were bluffing, meaning that all this was smoke and mirrors to get exactly what they had coveted from the Big 12 all along- full control of the Big 12. I pity the Big 12 whores who ponied up even more of their share of revenue to keep their pimpdaddy Texas.

Does it sound like I wasn’t thrilled with the Pac 16 concept? Yep, I didn’t want anything to do with Texas. I witnessed the early years of the Big 12 and how even-keeled the league was from the North to the South. But Texas was not happy about that and persuaded policy changes. It rotted out with all the power of the Big 12 in the heart of Texas. Somebody in the Big 12 needs to learn how to say NO to Texas. The Big 12 demise is a great example why every school in a league should have a voice in making policy. One school should not have full control. Welcome to our league fellas, this is a very diverse league that stretches from the vast desert, SoCal, Bay area, and the Pacific Northwest. We see Colorado as the overwhelming perfect choice and can’t wait for our first Pac 12 football game in Boulder. Seeing Ralphie running out of the tunnel is going to be awesome.

That is much harder than the Big XII North. But cooler as well.

… then here’s a possible solution that I propose:

As a CU alum who lives in Atlanta, I would like to add some thoughts about how a Colorado & Utah Pac12 of two divisions would likely best work for all, based on what I think is fair, especially in handling the four California schools, two in each (North and South) region of that state.

First, it wouldn’t be fair to put all four California schools in the same division. The six schools that would not be in that division would be at a vast disadvantage in recruiting.

Second, this assumes that Cal, Stanford, and the Oregon and Washington schools would refuse to allow a southern division of SC, UCLA, UA, ASU, CU, and Utah, because it would hurt all six of those schools in recruiting fertile Southern California (not to mention in playing in better weather later in the season) and unduly benefit the Arizona and mountain schools.

Third, we see in the Southeast how well it works for traditional rivals like Alabama and Tennessee to play each other every year in football even though they’re in separate SEC divisions. In the ACC, we’ve also seen that it isn’t a disaster to have two divisions created without geographical logic.

SO … applying those SEC and ACC lessons to the Pac-12 …

For football, you could place each of the traditional (and, in the case of Utah & Colorado, new) rivals in separate divisions, along the following lines, so that in each division you have a rival in one of the states of WA, OR, AZ, and in the other region of CA, and in the other part of the Rockies:

Washington
Oregon State
Cal
USC
Arizona State
Colorado

Washington State
Oregon
Stanford
UCLA
Arizona
Utah

You could move those particular groupings around if needed for competitive balance, but that one looks fairly good as of 2010.

The system could be set up so that each of the traditional (or new) rivals would play each other in football outside of its division, as Bama does with Tennessee each year and Georgia does with Auburn each year. You could even make it so that each such game is to end the season, such as Georgia and Georgia Tech and Clemson and South Carolina do (in their case, across conferences, but the same could work across divisions), and such as many of those rivals do already. That would give you five division games each fall, plus a traditional rival for a sixth game, with seventh and eighth games with foes from the other division on a round robin basis like the SEC does, with competitive balancing as best as possible.

In many ways, that would work better in the Pac12 than it does in the SEC, where some of the teams have more than one longstanding traditional rival in the other division, and thus do not get to play that secondary traditional rival every year as once was the case in the smaller SEC before it expanded to 12 teams (for example, Alabama-Georgia; Alabama-Florida; Auburn-Georgia; Auburn-Florida; Auburn-Tennessee are all traditional rivalry games). In the current Pac10, none of the teams has a secondary traditional rival of similar intensity as those SEC examples….

Suck that Texas, enjoy your games against ISU, KSU, Baylor, Kansas, and TT, cause no one else is going to watch that crap. While USC vs CU has the great makings of a awesome game once CU gets the program turned around.

I look forward to seeing him on the visitor’s sideline. Wonder if we can pelt him with beer cups (er…Marshmallows)…