Lost in the haze as we await word on what happen to the remaining four Pac-12 schools is a forgotten story about the 100-year-old conference:
It’s not 100 years old.
The Pacific Coast Conference, the organization the Pac-12 has long called its origin, has no formal tie to what’s now the Pac-12. It disbanded in 1959 amidst scandal and infighting, and while eight of its then-members would eventually rejoin one another in competition, eventually becoming the Pac-8 we know from the pre-Arizona days, one member moved on and the other eight took time to make amends. Only four of the PCC’s nine members at the time of the disbandment immediately rejoined one another, and the Pac-8 didn’t manage to play a full round robin until more than ten years later.
Let’s go through the timeline.
December 1915: The PCC Forms
Cal. Washington. Oregon. Oregon State (Oregon Agricultural College, at the time). These were the first four members of the PCC. The Northwest Conference had ceased to govern football one year prior, leaving Washington, Oregon, and Oregon State without a home, and Cal had reintroduced football ahead of the 1915 season. From the multitudinous ranks of the independents, the PCC arose, joining the Missouri Valley Conference, the Rocky Mountain Conference, the South Atlantic and Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Associations (SAIAA and SIAA), the Southwest Conference, and the Western Conference as the seventh major college football league for the 1916 season.
Of those seven, only the Western Conference still exists, now known as the Big Ten. The Missouri Valley came close (it would become the Big 8), but it technically disbanded in 1996, with the Big 12 rising from its ashes.
1910s, 20s: The PCC Expands
Over the decade and a half following its creation, the PCC added six more schools: Washington State, in 1917. Stanford, in 1918. USC and Idaho, in 1922. Montana, in 1924. UCLA, in 1928. USC was suspended at one point in the 20s for a scandal involving allegations of paying recruits and players (a tradition as old as time), but amends were made quickly enough that the Trojans were reinstated before missing a full season. Here’s Cal’s version of that story.
1930s, 40s: Peacetime
Boring. Let’s move on.
1950s: SCANDAL!
Ahead of the 1950 season, Montana left the league, its state board of education deciding membership in the PCC was interfering with academic goals. I’m not sure exactly what they meant by this, but given Montana wasn’t performing all that well on the field, it’s possible travel was a concern or that they just didn’t want to have to set up the cheating apparatuses necessary to compete. Whatever the reason, they got out of there, and then all shit hit the fan. A possibly incomplete list:
- In 1951, Oregon’s football coach, Jim Aiken, got in trouble for breaking conference rules regarding money going to athletes.
- After Aiken resigned, Oregon told the PCC to look into UCLA’s coach, Red Sanders. It’s unclear what came of these charges, but don’t worry, we’ve got more.
- In January of 1956, some of Washington’s own players went after their coach, John Cherberg (later the lieutenant governor of the state). Depending who you ask, this could have tied back to anything from Cherberg physically abusing players to racist players being upset about Cherberg recruiting Black athletes to Washington. (Here’s an account that somehow manages to be decently sympathetic to just about everybody involved.) In retaliation for the uprising, which successfully led to his firing, Cherberg exposed Washington’s booster-driven fund for paying recruits and players and giving them other impermissible benefits like free shoes from a guy named Lloyd Nordstrom. The situation didn’t stop there.
- In March of 1956, someone (some sources have this as an outgoing transfer who landed at Cal) blew the whistle on UCLA’s own booster funds. UCLA stonewalled the PCC investigation for months, and when finally brought down, a UCLA alum blew the whistle himself on similar programs run by USC and Cal. In a six-year span, five of the PCC’s nine members had seen their pay-for-play schemes exposed. Only Stanford, Oregon State, Idaho, and Washington State were either clean or still not caught.
Predictably, there were reactions, and ultimately, following the 1958 season, the PCC fell apart. Immediately, Cal, UCLA, USC, Stanford, and Washington began discussions to form a new league. After a brief dalliance with a proposal that would have grouped them with the service academies, Notre Dame, Penn State, and others in the Airplane Conference (Pitt was the ringleader, the Pentagon is said to have squashed the effort), four of the five went into business together, and Stanford joined a month later. The Athletic Association of Western Universities was born. Later, after adding back Washington State in 1962 and the Oregon schools in 1964, it became the Pac-8.
I’m not sure why the AAWU didn’t want Washington State and the Oregons back in the league right away, whether it was lingering bad blood or academic scorn or athletic scorn or something else entirely. Idaho, the story goes, decided it wasn’t interested anyway, heading off to eventually rejoin Montana in starting the Big Sky.
**
One way to interpret the PCC’s transition to the Pac-8 is that the five schools who founded the AAWU responded to the scandals of the day by, in a roundabout way, kicking out Oregon, Oregon State, Idaho, and Washington State and undergoing a complete overhaul in governance. Another way is that the league got in such a big fight that it broke up without any plans about what should come next. It’s likely there’s historic evidence supporting one explanation or the other, but that’s a bit hard to unearth in one afternoon. Our broader takeaway is this:
Seventy years ago, questions of amateurism and academics and recruiting rules and all the rest pulled one of the nation’s premier college conferences apart. In the end, the schools which wanted to play one another found each other again. Conference realignment is never permanent, and it’s possible we’ll one day look back on it as a great big circle. Take heart, ye who mourn the Pac-12. It died before. We got it back for a good, long run.
