THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: From the Pac-8 to the Pac-10 to the Pac-12 to the Pac-2

While we raked leaves in our yard on fall Saturdays in the late 1960s in Salem, Ore., we listened to Oregon State football games on the radio. 

One day, we learned one of our neighbors knew Dee Andros, aka the “Great Pumpkin” and OSU football coach, which elevated our neighbor to hero status in our eyes. 

We watched UCLA-Houston in 1968 on a 13-inch black-and-white television, Lew Alcindor and Elvin Hayes battling in the Astrodome in the “Game of the Century” before 52,693 at the Astrodome in Houston. 

Though UCLA wasn’t “local,” we rooted for UCLA all those years, because they were a Pac-8 school and a dominant one at that. 

Ditto USC football, when they made all those Rose Bowl appearances in the 1970s. 

After we moved to Salt Lake City in 1970, we got a taste of the old Western Athletic Conference.  

Utah and BYU. Arizona and Arizona State. Wyoming and Colorado State. UTEP and New Mexico. A conference perhaps a notch below the Pac-8, but boasting teams that maybe didn’t believe that. 

It was indeed the Wacky WAC, with its rabid fans. The fact very few games were televised added to the intrigue — and the legend. 

Arizona and Arizona State left the WAC for the Pac-8 in 1978, making it the Pac-10. Utah (and Colorado) joined the Pac in 2011, making it the Pac-12. 

This year, 10 of those teams have fled the Pac, leaving Washington State and Oregon State behind. 

Funny, Utah, BYU, Arizona and Arizona State are back together in the same conference (the Big 12) for the first time since 1977-78. 

What goes around ... 

Oregon and Washington have left for the Big Ten, joining Pac-mates USC and UCLA. 

Stanford and California are in the Atlantic Coast Conference. 

Of course. 

While like with most breakups, this one didn’t really need to happen. We understand why, but that doesn’t make it any easier. 

Like with a long-lost love, you hold out hope they will someday return, and everything will be back to normal. 

But deep down, you realize that it probably isn’t going to happen. 

Probably. 

LONG AGO, folks said it was bad for UCLA to dominate college basketball like it did, winning seven NCAA titles in a row, and 10 in 12 seasons. 

But given what has happened to the “Conference of Champions” over the past two-plus decades, we wouldn’t mind that sort of “boredom.” 

I wasn’t bored. I enjoyed watching the greatness of Lew Alcindor and, later, Bill Walton.  

After Big Lew graduated, I enjoyed watching Sidney Wicks and UCLA beat Artis Gilmore and Jacksonville in 1970, and Steve Patterson and UCLA beating Villanova in ‘71, just to prove the Bruins could still do it without the dominant big man. 

Same with 1975, when a pedestrian UCLA squad led by Marques Johnson and freshman Richard Washington sent John Wooden into retirement with his 10th national title.  

Now? 

UCLA didn’t return to glory for 20 more years, thanks to Tyus Edney’s end-to-end dash in Boise in the second round in 1995. 

When Arizona won in 1997, it was thought maybe the “Conference of Champions” would continue as a major player in men’s college hoops. 

Nope. 

That was the last national title for the "Conference of Champions.” 

Only twice has a Pac-12 (Pac-10 then) team played for the national title — Arizona in 2001, UCLA in 2006. 

During that stretch, most of the championships have been won by teams from the Big East, ACC, Big 12 and SEC. 

USC WAS one of the top college football teams in the 1970s, winning three national titles (two of them shared, since those were the days national champions were determined by voters, and not on the field). 

Washington shared a national title in 1991, and USC won national titles again in 2003 and 2004. 

But since? Nothing. 

Oregon had a legit shot against Auburn in the 2010 national title game, not so much against Ohio State four years later. 

The Huskies played in the title game this past season, but lost handily to Michigan. 

Most of the national champs in the last two decades have come from the SEC, with some from the Big Ten and ACC. 

I REMEMBER when the Pac-12 dominated the College World Series in softball — and sometimes, it was Arizona and UCLA meeting for the title, as they did five times from 1991 to ‘97. 

But after winning 24 national titles in softball in 30 seasons since the event began in 1982, the Pac-12 has won just one of the last 12 — UCLA in 2019. And in only one other year during that stretch did the “Conference of Champions” even have a team play for the championship. 

The Big 12, the ACC and the SEC have taken over college softball. 

I REMEMBER when USC and Arizona State were annually among the top teams in college baseball. Nowadays, kids would probably have to Google those schools to see if they still offered baseball. 

These days, Pac-12 teams occasionally make it to the College World Series, but that’s about it. 

That makes what Oregon State has done in the last couple decades, winning the College World Series three times — in 2006, ‘07 and ‘18 — even that much more remarkable. 

The SEC — and, to a lesser extent, the ACC and Big 12 — have taken over college baseball. 

Notice a trend? 

I HATE it, but I understand it. A century of tradition — and some pretty good competition — down the toilet, mostly because of money.  

But the Pac-12 did it to itself, and not just because of the butchering of the Pac-12 Networks. The ACC Network, Big Ten Network and Longhorn Network, for example, all made it onto DirecTV, where all could see. The Pac-12, with six channels dedicated to two schools each, and a seventh, all-conference channel, couldn’t even do that. If games were banished to the Pac-12 Networks, instead of being on ESPN on FOX or whatever, folks complained because they couldn’t see them. 

Unless, of course, consumers wanted to shell out even more money for still another streaming service to overlap with their other streaming services, as well as supplement/overlap their cable or satellite services. 

Star recruits fled the West and the West Coast schools to play in the East and the Midwest and the South, playing in leagues which produced national champions. 

So in that regard, you can’t blame these schools for fleeing elsewhere. Asking people to stick around for the glory and the honor and the tradition of the Pac-12 is not a good enough argument.  

And you know if Washington State and Oregon State were courted by these other conferences as much as Oregon, Washington, UCLA and USC, WSU and OSU would be gone too. 

But they weren’t, so what’s going to happen in two years? Leaders from both schools say this realignment stuff isn’t over, so there may be some breadcrumbs from other conferences lying around to compile a pretty good league. 

I’m sure the Mountain West schools — the top ones, anyway — would love to merge with WSU and OSU, perhaps thinking that would automatically elevate them to Power-5 status. Maybe WSU and OSU think settling for a “reverse merger” with the Mountain West would drag them down into Group of 5 status, so the Cougs and Beavs are holding out for a better scenario. 

Meanwhile, all the power and the money have shifted to the East over the past couple decades. And the eyeballs were already there.  Only diehards and insomniacs back East paid attention to the Pac-12 in recent years. 

IT WILL be interesting to see if those who bailed on the Pac-12 for the Big Ten, the Big 12 and the ACC, once they face that competition on a weekly basis, see their programs elevate to the point where they are playing for national titles — at which point you couldn’t argue as much with their leaving the conference in their geographic region to take the money.

But if those programs start floundering in a sea of .500 seasons ... well, only they can answer if all the extra TV money was worth all the extra travel.  

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 208-664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @CdAPressSports.