Not hard to see why most legitimate fans would feel bad about pretty much all of it. Hard to see the B10 boltees doing as well in that conference. Of the B12 boltees, the only one I'd expect to see in the upper half of the league at the end of their first season is Utah. The conversation about actual UW grads vs the bandwagon folks goes double for SC. I live in SoCal and have yet to talk to an actual Toejam alum who thinks there is a bright future for SC in the B10...and the UCLA alums are split between the camp who does not follow football (they really miss the PAC) and the group that are football fans (they seem to think UCLA will be another Purdue).
Sure, we could all be surprised.
An aspect not discussed much to this point is recruiting. Utah has its Mormon & Poly roots to help with recruiting, but does anybody think the Arizonas will do better trying to focus on TX than they did in focusing on SoCal? Colorado will be unable to overcome their internal issues in what ever league they find themselves. Oregon will continue to buy & bling players as long as uncle Phil is writing checks, but flights, time zone issues & being far from the player's families will bite them as it will bite the others. Of the whole group, I suspect that Oregon's recruiting will suffer the least, because they were always the SEC cheater-type recruiter in the PAC, and now since it is legal, they can write the same checks regardless of which league they populate. UW is probably the biggest question mark. They already had a big advantage in in-state WA recruiting, but with WSU in a lesser conference that probably only gains UW a recruit or two each year. What happens in their CA recruiting? HS football has been on a decline in CA for a while now, for a host of reasons....head injuries, decline in local HS sports reporting, and lots of other things to do among them. Does anybody think that the PAC collapse and the local teams being in some new conference is not going to depress interest in college football? Which will further depress interest in HS football? How well will UW recruit Chicagoland?
Lots of questions to be answered later. From my chair it appears that pretty much everybody out west lost. There will be some silver linings in the dark clouds, but just how dark the clouds are is yet to be seen.
We sang "We shall overcome" in church last week. I could not help but think of WSU and OSU as I sang.
