The Pac-10 Ain't...
Gee Kane
January 31, 2008
Please excuse my language and my grammar, but I’ve had enough. The Pac-10 ain’t shit. Feel free to call that East Coast bias or Eastern Shore of Maryland bias or east Baltimore bias or whatever kind of bias I might be representing, but it is also the truth.
I want to reach inside the TV and strangle announcers like Doug Gottlieb when they start ranting about how deep the conference is.
Here’s a quick challenge: name the five conferences that have sent more than one team to the Final Four in the past five years. I’ll give you a hint, the Pac-10 ain’t one of them. My new favorite saying (now that I’m boycotting “it is what it is”) is “like I said” and like I said, the Pac 10 ain’t shit.
Have you noticed recently that people – especially athletes – will say “like I said” when they have never actually broached the topic earlier in the conversation? Say it with me Andy Katz, Doug Gottlieb, Tee Kane, and all other West Coast apologists, the Pac-10 ain’t…come on just say it.
I understand why no one wants to tell Avon Barksdale the west side is over and done with, but I’ll tell the west-side Pac-10 they deserve at most four teams in the NCAA tournament, not eight or nine like I heard tonight. The three teams (other than UCLA) who are leading the conference standings right now last won the NCAA tournament in the year 1941, 19never, and 19never.
Here’s another question (I will give you the answer to this one): who is the last Pac-10 team other than UCLA or Arizona to win a national championship and in what year did that take place? It was that special group of young men that made up the 1959 Cal Bears.
The great thing about comparing college basketball conferences as opposed to college football conferences is that the madness of March tells us who should compete for the championship, while the silence of December just gives football players 30 days of rest before their championship.
The Big East has had three different teams in 22 years win the national championship, the Big Ten has had three in 21 years, the SEC has had three in 14 years, and the ACC has had three in seven years. The Pac-10 has had three in 49 years.
I told Tee’s Weekly Founder Tee three weeks ago that Washington State is a good MAAC team. He looked at me like I just told him that I dropped a spike in his sock drawer. He then berated me while keeping that same facial expression, “Uhh, no, I’m pretty sure they’re a top-two team in the country. Have you even seen their efficiency ratings? Their rebounds per minute per possession for night road games are like almost above a 1.36. Do you even know what that means? Derrick Low has one of the best steals per inch of anybody since Trajan Langdon. And furthermore, Cougars is the best nickname in the Pac–10.”
So, I thought about that and then I reconsidered my stance and eventually I told Tee, “The Pac-10 ain’t shit.”
Washington State got embarrassed by an unranked team by 12 points on Thursday night. The only other top-10 team that has a big loss to an unranked team this year is the Pac-10’s own UCLA. The Bruins have arguably the best program in the last 50 years of any team and they’ve been to the Final Four the past two years, but they make the conference very top heavy and not extremely deep like I’ve heard from announcers more than once in recent Pac-10 games.
The bottom line is teams from weak conferences are not battle-tested and have trouble winning four straight games in the tournament in order to get to the Final Four. Pac-10 teams have managed to send just nine out of the possible 120 Final Four teams in the last 30 years.
There may be an East Coast media bias in college football that hinders teams in the BCS rankings, which affects their ability to play for a title. In college hoops, everyone who has a realistic chance at the title gets invited to play for it. Since JFK was elected, only two Pac-10 teams have taken advantage of that opportunity. This year will be no different.