Earlier this summer, I was invited to be a guest on an episode of the Aztecs All In podcast to talk about San Diego State baseball. (One of the other hats I wear is running the SoCalBaseball.org website, tracking college baseball in Southern California.)
The topic of the then-pending college athletics realignment came up: SDSU had just walked back its announced intention to leave the Mountain West Conference because the MWC had refused to budge on the contractually agreed-upon exit fee, which SDSU couldn’t afford.
The presumption in early July was still that the as soon as the Pac 12 signed its new broadcast deal, they would invite SDSU in to help replace the departing USC and UCLA.
When pressed by the podcast hosts on how I thought things would unfold, I said I hope it didn’t end up similar to when SDSU announced it was exiting the Mountain West to join the Big East a decade ago — only to have the Big East expansion collapse, leaving the Aztecs to come crawling back to the Mountain West hat in hand.
Well, as we now know, to this point that’s exactly what happened. Oregon and Washington joined USC and UCLA in heading to the Big Ten, Colorado headed to the Big 12 — and was then joined by Arizona, Utah and Arizona State.
So the once mighty Pac 12 is now the Pac 4, and Stanford is begging the Atlantic Coast Conference to take it in — even as Clemson and Florida State are clamoring to leave the ACC for greener pastures.
While my alma mater, San Diego State (where I called home baseball games on the student radio station in 1986), still hopes for an invite to one of the major conferences, I sit and wonder how the geniuses running our universities are seemingly incapable of wrapping their heads around the fact that there is no treasure waiting for them regardless of which conference they are in.
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