The Oregon-Stanford winner could be the Pac-12's last hope

Before the college football season began, the head of the Pac-12’s eponymous and long-struggling television network made a curious proclamation: It would focus more of its energy on football. It kind of blows my mind that the Pac-12 hadn’t been doing this already, and while I sort of admire its insistent commitment to the wide array of Olympic sports that the conference excels in, it still seems strange not to recognize that football tends to move the needle with viewers and alumni — particularly, you know, during football season.
           
But then, this is the Pac-12. It is an alternate dimension for football out here in this faraway time zone where I happen to reside. It's where the very concept of conference games being played after dark has become a font for WTF outcomes, perplexing strategic choices and overarching cosmic chaos. This is a conference where Mike Leach thrives, and this a conference where Chip Kelly seems to keep finding jobs. This is a conference where arguably the most consistent program in the conference over the past decade, Stanford, is also the school where football matters the least in the grand scheme of school spirit. It’s the Reggie’s of college football. And it’s also a conference that went 1-8 in bowl games last year — and over the course of the first four years of the College Football Playoff— has placed only two teams in the top four and won only a single game.            

On Saturday, Stanford will travel to play Oregon in what is the biggest game of the Pac-12 season to date, and perhaps the biggest Pac-12 game in several years given the national spotlight on it. Both teams are 3-0, and the winner of this game would appear to be in prime position to take the Pac-12’s North Division.

But it also means that after this week, the Pac-12 will find itself in a precarious playoff position. After this Saturday, the entire conference already will be down to no more than four undefeated teams. Outside of Stanford and Oregon, two of those teams are Colorado and California, a pair of rebuilding programs that have yet to be seriously tested. The other is Washington State, which has a tendency, through the sheer thinness of its roster, to lose a game it should have won. The conference’s standard-bearer, USC, with two losses, is a festering mess once more. And the preseason playoff favorite, Washington, lost to a since-defeated Auburn team in its season opener, which means it may have to run through the conference without a blemish if it hopes to land in the top four.

This spells trouble for a league that is literally hoping to sell itself through football this season. The college football landscape is constantly shifting, both in terms of money and power. But with the exception of those powerhouse USC teams and a couple of Oregon near-misses this century, the Pac-12 has often felt like an inferior entity with less passionate fan bases and, therefore, less urgency to win. If the conference were to be excluded from the playoff for a second consecutive year, it would only exacerbate that perception.

“We have to elevate and promote the value of our football product to potential distributors for the next six months and the next six years,” Pac-12 networks president Mark Shuken told Jon Wilner of the Mercury News. So perception leads to fan engagement, and fan engagement leads to ratings, and ratings lead to money, and that chain could easily fray if the Pac-12, once again, has a handful of good football teams and no great ones — which, no matter what happens on Saturday in Eugene, is ever closer to becoming the case.