Canzano: Pac-12's last dance draws a crowd
"It's the last one. I had to be here."
LAS VEGAS — I bumped into Neil Everett in the wee hours of Thursday morning in a hotel gift shop near the end of The Strip. The former ESPN SportsCenter anchor was buying a bag of potato chips and a Kona Big Wave beer.
We greeted each other and talked for a spell.
“It’s the last one,” he told me. “I had to be here.”
Everett is in town for the men’s Pac-12 Conference Tournament. 10,050 ticket holders showed up at T-Mobile Arena for the morning session and 10,133 more packed the house for the evening games. It was the largest number of first-day tickets sold for the conference basketball event since it moved to the venue eight years ago.
This week, T-Mobile is both a hot ticket and also, the saddest nightclub on The Strip. UCLA coach Mick Cronin walked into the post-game news conference after his team beat Oregon State on Wednesday, saw shiny “Pac-12” branded water bottles sitting on the table, and said: “Impressive — a collectible.”
Cronin took his bottle with him when he left. He reminded two Bruin players seated alongside him to take theirs, too. First, though, UCLA’s coach said that he’s going to miss coaching games against Beavers’ coach Wayne Tinkle. They’ve become friends. And later, Tinkle had a sobering exchange with a reporter.
Reporter: “This is your last ever Pac-12 game. Any thoughts?”
Tinkle: “For the next couple of years.”
Reporter: “You know what I mean.”
Tinkle: “I know.”
Reporter: “The Pac-12, as we know it. Your thoughts on that?”
Tinkle: “I purposely didn't want to think about that a whole lot. I'm kind of over my disgust and frustration… it’s a shame that we’re in the position that we’re in, to be quite honest.”
I bought tickets to an Elton John concert a few years ago at T-Mobile Arena. It was the singer’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour. He’s iconic. I didn’t need to see the singer one last time. But when my wife and I heard it was the final opportunity to see him live, we bought tickets and headed to the arena like it was a mattress store having a “Going Out of Business” sale.
The Pac-12 feels like it’s holding one of those events this week. It will continue as a two-team conference next season, sure, but the 108-year-old conference won’t ever really be the same. A year from now, 10 schools will be someplace else while Oregon State and Washington State play out their basketball season 2.5 miles away at Orleans Arena in the West Coast Conference tournament. And this week’s closing act feels like a somber study.
Some Pac-12 staffers are fine talking about the sadness around the end of the conference (as we know it). Others just shake their heads at the absurdity and tell you they’re all talked out on the subject.
One conference employee told me that he gets queasy when he hears people buzzing about possibly watching an NBA or MLB game through an Apple Vision Pro headset. A missed opportunity, he thinks. We’ll never know what the Pac-12’s potential media rights deal with Apple could have done for the schools.
“Can you imagine the impact that meeting with Apple’s marketing team — even for an hour — would have had on our schools?” he asked me. “It makes me so angry that I can’t even go there.”
Oregon, Washington, USC, and UCLA will belong to the Big Ten at the end of June. Utah, Arizona, ASU, and Colorado will head to the Big 12. And Stanford and Cal will park their Winnebagos in the ACC lot. The whisper is that the Mountain West Conference may slide into T-Mobile next spring for its conference basketball tournament. The WCC is still under contract with Orleans Arena for one more year.
Over the next three days, the Pac-12 teams will play seven more basketball games. Then, they’ll scatter like marbles dropped on the kitchen floor. I don’t know if the basketball is going to be great, but I do know that 10,000-plus people are here hoping to soak it up. I talked with some of them on Wednesday.
Carter Lawrence, 9, sat with a giant bucket of popcorn in his lap, watching Oregon State’s final game of the season. He was dressed in orange, head to toe, and sat beside his grandparents, mother, and younger sister. Lawrence’s father, Ryan, is the director of basketball operations for OSU.
“I have a school project due this week that I’m thinking about,” Carter told me, “but I love being here for the basketball.”
Scott Higgins, the former mayor of Camas, Wash., brought one of his daughters to T-Mobile Arena. They sat together and watched the morning session on Wednesday.
“I don’t have a team,” Higgins said. “I root for the conference.”
Matthew McNelly, a church pastor at Pullman Presbyterian Church, jumped in his 2000 Chevy Tahoe on Wednesday morning and pointed it toward Las Vegas. It’s a 16-hour drive from Pullman. The pastor sent me a message on Wednesday night, telling me he’d covered 800 miles in a single day. McNelly has a ticket for Thursday’s evening session at T-Mobile Arena.
“Checked into a motel in Tonopah,” the pastor wrote. “If I was 10 years younger I would have driven through to Vegas. Been an epic drive so far.”
The pastor’s congregation is among the collateral damage in the break-up of the conference. The day the Pac-12 splintered last summer I wrote a column about the church’s youth group. It sells spots in the church parking lot on Washington State football game days for $25 to generate revenue for activities and outings. The kids collected a premium ($40 or $50) when Oregon, USC, UCLA, and some others visited Pullman.
McNelly told me: “All that goes away now.”
What killed the Pac-12 as we knew it? Greed? Arrogance? Foolishness? Television? Awful leadership? Pick your poison. What’s evident is that the industry of college football is dragging basketball and a line of Olympic sports off to other places next year. I wonder how many of those sports programs will even exist in a decade. And I doubt those responsible for the downfall of the Pac-12 even care.
Something very interesting is happening at T-Mobile this week. It goes far beyond the basketball. I looked around during the sessions on Wednesday, noted the energy in the building, and talked with Pac-12 staffers about what everyone agreed was an uptick in attendance. It wasn’t just a feeling. The numbers didn’t lie.
People showed up in Las Vegas. They watched college basketball together on Wednesday and began absorbing the final hours of Pac-12 competition. There are some other events on the calendar. In May, the Pac-12 baseball tournament in Arizona will be the conference’s final official event for these 12 schools. But this basketball thing still feels like it has some magic left.
It’s a collectible itself.
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Heard in Seattle and Eugene -- 'Why would we want to have a partnership with Apple? Other than that they are the most valuable and creative and marketing-savvy company on the face of the earth. Streaming and virtual headsets and all that is so ... future. Lets stay in the present with financially shaky folks like ESPN and take a second-cousin share of proceeds from a conference centered thousands of miles and a couple of time zones away. Yup, that's the future we want!' Long sigh.
To two commissioners (term used lightly) and the ten university administrations (again used lightly) wake up and smell the destruction you caused for the student athletes and the fans. Words can’t describe what you have done.