Yeah. Well.
The idea of the Michigan Wolverines being the champions of "the West" seems a little bizarre, to those of us in the Northwest Corner. Or I suspect to anyone living west of the Mississippi. A bit like Spokane's Gonzaga one day claiming to be champions of "the East."
But let's not quibble. As of tonight, they are the champions of American college football.
They won decisively, 34-13, against our local Huskies. Huskies who in game after game had shown themselves able to beat the odds -- literally -- and to pull themselves out of scoring holes in the final minutes of close games. Not this time. They were behind Michigan the entire game, start to finish.
I sadly admit it. Tonight, at least, Michigan was the better team. Their win wasn't a fluke.
Washington isn't my undergrad school, but it is something of an adopted school -- both because I live several blocks south of its campus, and because I received from it both a graduate degree and a law degree. In all sports essentially a fair-weather fan, I rooted for the Huskies most of this season, awestruck by their ability to pull wins out of seemingly sure losses. Sort of "anti-couging" their games, as it were.
But beyond my personal attachments to the school, I rooted for the Huskies because they represented the Pac-12 in its last hurrah before it committed conference suicide. I grew up watching the nine-team Pacific Coast Conference mutate into the Pac-5, then the Pac-8, then the Pac-10, and finally the Pac-12. It was the conference of the West Coast, despite those later questionable additions of the two Arizona schools, and then the even more questionable addition of Utah and Colorado.
In my fantasies, at least, the Pacific Coast conference valued academic performance more than most other conferences, and tried to hold on to the archaic belief that college football games were played by ordinary students who merely had athletic interests and abilities. Students who played football as recreation, in the same way as lawyers and businessmen might play squash or golf.
Let's all have a good laugh, before I continue.
So, as of next fall, Washington joins Michigan in the Big Ten, and the Pac-12, now reduced to two members, probably fades away into the mists of history. At least the UW joins the Big Ten, not certain other conferences I could snarkily name. I've always believed that the Big Ten was a midwestern brother of the Pac-12 -- not just because their two champions met annually in the Rose Bowl, but because the Big Ten was composed of schools with equally high academic reputations.
And Michigan's academic reputation was (and is) near the top of the Big Ten. So we lost to a team from a school I respect for reasons other than football prowess.
My own undergraduate school has slunk off to the Atlantic Coast Conference -- despite our campus's being located a few short miles from the Pacific Ocean. Aside from the geographical absurdity of its new affiliation, in my opinionated opinion it will be hanging out with a fairly shady group of schools (Duke and a couple of others excepted), like an innocent child whose parents have lost money and have moved to a more dangerous neighborhood -- but what do I know? Who knows what goes on back there on the Atlantic coast? I guess I'll learn some of the answers in coming football seasons.
So, I'm sad about tonight's loss to Michigan, and I'm sad about the dissolution of the Pac-12. The football seasons to come will have their interesting moments, I'm sure, but overall I suspect that everything is falling apart. The television industry has a talent for ruining everything to which it turns its mercenary attention.
Sort of the anti-Midas touch. The death of the Pac-12 is but the latest example.
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