Interesting perspective about Pac-10 re-alignment...

http://blog.oregonlive.com/behindducksbeat/2010/10/oregon_ducks_rundown_it_looks.html

Ken Goe argues that the Northwest teams are the losers if Pac-10/Pac-12 re-alignment goes in the direction of pairing all Northwest teams into the northern division and all california teams with Utah and Colorado into the Southern division. What do you think?

I personally disagree. Successful football programs will be able to recruit in California regardless. As is typical with sportswriters, Goe focusses on men's American football, while ignoring travel concerns, etc. for all other sports... In addition, I think breaking up the UW vs. U of O rivalry wouldn't be good for anyone involved. It's grown dramatically since I was a kid and the evil empire was always USC.

Your opinion?

USC wants a North/South, but to play Cal and Stanford each year. http://sports.espn.go.com/los-angeles/ncf/news/story?id=5686274 That would mean even fewer trips to LA for the NW schools.

We need to keep the Oregon Schools playing the Washington schools each year. The NW schools also need to make trips on a regular basis to LA for recruiting.

This should have all been dealt with prior to deciding on expansion.

Seems like they're bowing to Stanfurd and Cal by giving them guaranteed cross-division games against USC/UCLA every year. With "zipper" divisions, do you think the NW schools could make the same demands?
This seems like an interesting problem, because someone is going to lose out on traditional rivalries. With most of the realignments, I'd say schools that want to keep those rivalries going can schedule them OOC on their own. But what happens when those are in-conference games? Is it possible to schedule a conference opponent you wouldn't otherwise be playing in a given year on the OOC part of a schedule?

Back when the Pac 10 only played 8 conference games, didn't the conference still make sure to put Oregon and OSU against UW every year?

PurplePrideTrumpet wrote:Back when the Pac 10 only played 8 conference games, didn't the conference still make sure to put Oregon and OSU against UW every year?

No, Oregon didn't play UW in 2001, a year Oregon won the pac 10.

I think each school should only be guaranteed one cross-division rival. My examples are:

USC-Stanford - what's your deal?
UCLA-Cal - the UC system rivalry
Oregon-Arizona - Kelly vs Stoops #@&*%!$
Oregon St - Arizona St - the Dennis Erickson rivalry
Washington - Colorado - two Nueheisal haters
WSU - Utah - who's left

With two six-team divisions, that means five divisional game and either 3 or 4 cross-divisional games. Which means that out of the 11 possible opponents, you will still play 8 or 9 of them every year, and the ones you don’t play one season you will play the next. Seems fine to me.

As for playing in SoCal – there are only three D1 FBS football schools in Southern California: USC, UCLA, and San Diego State. In the whole state of California, you add Cal, Stanford, Fresno State, and San Jose State. So, a grand total of seven D1 schools for 37 million people, which breaks down to apx. 5 million people per school.

If you treat Oregon and Washington as one recruiting pool, it’s 10 million people for 4 schools.

My point? My point is that UCLA, USC, and Stanford all recruit very strongly on a national level… and even if they did only recruit California, there would still be way more players than those schools could ever give scholarships too. So naturally those kids would look to schools in Oregon, Washington, and Arizona… I really don’t think the fact that those teams play down there once every other year (as they do currently) is the make or break factor for them picking a college. They just want to go somewhere that is on TV and wins.

They just want to go somewhere that is on TV and wins.

Then obviously they will go to UC Eugene.