Why the Pac-10 Has No Bowls

I hate to admit this, as someone who has grown up in the Pac-10, as someone with close familial ties to seven different Pac-10 schools, as someone who generally gets more excited each year about the Rose Bowl than any ol' "BCS" game, but it may just be time to come out and say it:

Maybe the Pac-10 just isn't very good.

This nagging thought arose within me last year in Manhattan, on the day before New Year's Eve, when I was at a restaurant in Midtown, watching Arizona just get crushed 33-0 by Nebraska in the Holiday Bowl. This was part of a dismal 1-5 Bowl Season for the Pac-10, which essentially spent any and all of the goodwill that the conference had been able to build up across the country for the past two or three seasons.

But that was last year, right? Not this year, when the conference is being led by 11-0 Oregon, who is No. 2 in the BCS, and No. 1 in all three of the human polls? When the conference could possibly have two BCS berths for the first time since 2001? Right?

Well, I guess so. But not really.

The biggest concern for the Pac-10 is this: Going into the final weekend of the regular season, the conference has only three - yes, three - bowl eligible teams: No. 2 Oregon (11-0), No. 4 Stanford (11-1), and No. 23 Arizona (7-4). By comparison, six of the eight Big East teams - the very essence of mediocrity - are already bowl eligible. The Pac-10 currently has contracts with six different bowls (Rose, Alamo, Sun, Maaco [nee Las Vegas], Holiday, and Kraft Hungry). But if Oregon goes to the NC, and if Stanford gets selected by a different BCS game, then it is possible that only one of those games would actually end up hosting a team from the Pac-10.

Now, of course, there are many big caveats to this situation. The first, obviously, is the bowl ban on USC, who would otherwise already be eligible with a record of 7-5. The second, nobly, is that the Pac-10 schedules harder non-conference games than any of the other major conferences. The obvious example is 5-6 Oregon State, who had to play both Boise State and TCU this year. Switch either of those teams for, say, Wyoming or Utah State, and the Beavers have six wins and are going to the Maaco Bowl. A similar story could be said for Arizona State, who came within a field goal of beating No. 5 Wisconsin, but are now instead 5-6, and will not be going to a bowl game. On the flip side of this is the fact that the Pac-10 has had more marquee wins than any other conference: UCLA beat Texas, Arizona beat Iowa, Stanford beat Notre Dame, Oregon beat Tennessee. However, the other teams were punished for their ambition and are now going to suffer.

So there are at least some asterixes to the Pac-10's woeful win-loss percentages and lack of bowl invitations. But the simple fact is that the vast majority of teams underperformed this season, and that no one outside of Oregon and Stanford were able to gain anything resembling consistency. The Beavers would already be bowl eligible if they hadn't lost by 17 at home to Washington State. Meanwhile, Wazzu was the only road win for Cal all season long; as a result, they'll be ending up one win short of a bowl. And Arizona State would have gone bowling, too, if it were not for having an extra point blocked by USC in the fourth quarter of a game they lost by one point. However, none of these teams managed to come up big when they needed to. Four teams in the Pac-10 finished with conference records of 4-4; in fact, only Oregon and Stanford have winning records within the conference.

Coming in to this weekend, two Pac-10 teams will still have a chance to become bowl eligible: Oregon State and Washington. While I'd bet that everyone from Spokane to Pasadena will be rooting for the Beavers to pull off the upset this Saturday, I'm certain that Larry Scott, the Pac-10 commissioner, will be wearing green. That leaves the Huskies as the conference's great purple hope, and their last chance to salvage Jake Locker's senior season, and to secure a fourth bowl birth for the conference.

Addendum: For a more positive outlook, read Stewart Mandel's column here. I still don't think that he addresses the issue of none of the Pac-10's 4th through 8th teams being able to show any kind of consistency through the season.