LEXINGTON, Ky. — This is the way the Pac-12 ends, not with a bang but a 3-2 loss to Kentucky in baseball.
Let the record show that at 12:33 a.m. ET in the wee hours of Monday, Oregon State’s Micah McDowell was called out on strikes in the ninth inning with the tying run 90 feet away at third base. And with that, the Pac-12 conference as we know it went into the dustbin of league realignment history. The Beavers were the last team standing, in the last sport still playing. It was their fate to be the team that had to turn out the lights. Not that the honor — or whatever you’d call it — was much on their radar screen, given the pain of missing a trip to Omaha after losing by one run to the Wildcats.
“I guess I don't think too much on that one,” coach Mitch Canham said. “I focus on Oregon State and our baseball family, our athletic department, our university, our community in the Northwest. Outside of that, I mean, as a Christian, I love everybody and I want to see everyone succeed. I know there's always change. It does stink, and I think for those of us that grew up around that conference, it means a little something. It hurt a lot of people, but at the same time my responsibility is taking care of this baseball family.”
The Pac-12 now turns into a bus station, some members headed this way to the Big Ten, others that way to the Big 12, others another way to the ACC. Oregon State and Washington State are left behind, the last residents of a once-vibrant but now forlorn neighborhood. Presumably, the conference will be reborn in some form but the Pac-12 everyone knows officially expired on that strikeout. It would seem, then, that a few toasts are in order for some particularly renowned members, be they from the Pac-12, or the Pac-10 or the Pac-8, the league inflating its name every time new faces showed up at the door.
Here’s to the Stanford women’s golf team. Its national championship in May will forever be the last of the 561 titles the old conference produced. That’s 200 more than second place, by the way.
Here’s to the league’s women’s water polo teams who have won all 23 national championships. And the men, who have won the last 26 in a row.
Here’s to the Arizona State wrestling team of 1988, the one and only Pac-12 national title in that sport. The trophies have come by the truckload nearly everywhere else.
Here’s to the UCLA Bruins; to Wooden and Alcindor and Walton and all the guys from Westwood who created the greatest college basketball force ever witnessed. The Pac-12 might have cleaned up in swimming and beach volleyball and many other sports but it’s UCLA’s Wooden dynasty that put the conference in such bright lights.
Things changed in that sport, of course. So here’s to Arizona’s 1997 team, who went overtime to beat Kentucky for the title. Those Wildcats will always be the last men’s basketball national championship from the old Pac-12.
Here’s to the Stanford women’s basketball program, whose three national championships are the only Pac-12 titles in the past 40 years.
Here’s to Jackie Robinson and Tiger Woods and Barry Bonds and Steve Prefontaine and Arthur Ashe and the Miller kids — Reggie and Cheryl. They all were not just conference stars but became legends and cultural icons.
Here’s to John Elway and Aaron Rodgers, who turned out to be poster players for the most glamorous position in sports.
Here’s to Pat Tillman, the former Arizona State Sun Devil who left the NFL to go to war and died from friendly fire in Afghanistan.
Here’s to the early softball teams from places such as UCLA and Arizona who made the league the epicenter of the sport, accounting for 24 of the first 30 national champions. Then the softball landscape changed and the epicenter shifted east to places such as Norman, Oklahoma. The Pac-12 will fade away with only one softball title in the past 12 tournaments.
Here’s to all those Pac-12 football teams who once made early January so miserable for the Big Ten in the Rose Bowl. From 1970-87, the teams from the West greeted Midwestern visitors in Pasadena like lions waiting for the next zebra. The Big Ten went 2-16 in those 18 Rose Bowls. The Big Two of Bo Schembechler and Woody Hayes during that stretch were 2-10. Then there was the 1984 game when Illinois was No. 4 in the nation and the first team to ever go 9-0 in Big Ten play. UCLA was a slovenly 6-4-1, the first team to ever show up in the Rose Bowl with four losses. The Bruins won 45-9.
Late in that game, Big Ten commissioner Wayne Duke stood in the front row of the press box, peering over the edge to the crowd below. “Don’t mind me,” he told some reporters. “I’m just thinking about jumping.”
Here’s to all those Southern Cal running backs and quarterbacks who were handed eight Heismans. But the Pac-12 never did get around to winning a CFP championship game.
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Here’s to California, winner of the first Men's College World Series in 1947. Here’s to USC, who won five of them in a row in the 1970s. From 1957-88, Pac-12 teams left Omaha as champions 21 of 32 years. That run cooled a bit and there have been five this century. Here’s to Oregon State, who won three, including the last in 2018. The Beavers have been the one trespasser in the SEC victory parade over the past six MCWS.
Finally, here’s to the Beavers Sunday night, as the final chapter of the league. It was an odd role to play, and it was an odd game that did it. Kentucky edged Oregon State in a pitching duel that saw only six combined hits but 26 strikeouts. Four of the runs scored on two bases-loaded walks, a squeeze bunt and a wild pitch on a third strike. In two games here, the Beavers had three singles and hit .053. They still stranded nine runners Sunday partly because of nine Kentucky walks.
“It felt like we were always one hit away,” left fielder Dallas Macias said. But the hit never came, so there on the field well after midnight was the victory dogpile of the Kentucky Wildcats, celebrating the school’s first-ever Men's College World Series berth. The Oregon State Beavers watched forlornly from the dugout, the last remnants of a once-mighty conference.
Canham gathered his troops for some parting words. “Something I need to tell people more often, that I love them,” he said. “I could see it in their eyes how much they care and how much it stings. But really just getting to bring them all in one more time together. As I called them up, I wanted to make sure they were real close (to hear). I yell at them enough about a million other things. I didn't want to yell when I was telling them how much I loved them.”
In that tight huddle, while the Big Blue Nation partied and the music blared from the loud speakers, the Oregon State baseball team brought down the final curtain on the Conference of Champions. "I know we're in a good place going forward for what we have planned out in our near future with our schedule and everything else," Canham said.
The Beavers soon left for home. The Pac-12 was the past.
