Kyle Whittingham Realignment Plans and the “Pac” Not Done Growing?
Utah's football coach shares his realignment expectations and the Pac-10 commissioner hints at future expansion...
Kyle Whittingham went on AM 910 in Phoenix, Arizona and was asked how important it was for the Utes to be in the same division as USC:
"That's most likely I think if you look at the makeup of the Pac-12, I guess it now is, with the natural break geographically and to keep the rivalries intact that are already going as far as keeping them in the same division of the conference. I think it makes sense probably to have UCLA, USC, Arizona, Arizona State, us, and Colorado in whatever you go a southern conference or whatever you want to call it: southern division. SC is a name school. They're one of the most storied programs in the country...
We have had a chance to play 'SC' a couple times and our guys get fired up any time we get to play a school like that."
Whether he's just sharing an honest opinion or doing a little campaigning from the outside of a negotiating table he knows he won't be a part of, it's a smart move. Rather, it's a no-brainer position to take from a Utah perspective. It would mean walking into homes across southern California and explaining to every high school recruit that he'd be coming home to play in front of friends and family every year, whether it be against USC or UCLA. That's also, of course, dependent upon the conference properly staggering the schedule.
I simply don't understand how the northern Pac-10 schools go along with this plan over the "zipper" idea where they split the conference down the middle, put rival schools in opposing divisions, and make them permanent opponents while rotating the rest. But if the northern California, Oregon, and Washington schools want to purposely limit their access to southern California, schools like Utah and Colorado will be happy to oblige.
And while we're on the topic, the Pac-16 idea may be on the back burner but they haven't turned off the stove.
Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott on KLAC-AM in Los Angeles kept the idea very much alive in the long term:
"It seems to me that things will find relative calm for now. Having said that, the kind of reaction we got to the vision we laid out for a 16 team conference with the divisions and with the value that it would've created, it generated too much excitement for the idea to go away. So I'd be surprised if we don't see some time in the future, although it may not be the very short term, this idea come up again because people found it to be a very compelling vision."
Very compelling vision or most transparent selling of "student-athlete" souls for the almighty dollar? Either way, it got people talking. Enough so that a yet to be named television network, or networks, jumped in to save the Big 12 and prevent an insane bidding war for a Pac-16 conference whose actual inventory wouldn't match up to the price that was paid for it.
In other words, ESPN or FOX paying a premium to put too many Washington State - Oklahoma State style matchups on TV when all they really ever wanted was control over Texas and USC.
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