Well the Pac-12 had a good run. I won’t recap the gory details of the past week; there are plenty of other great resources out there for that. (As ever I am a fan of Wilner, here is his decline and fall of the Pac 12.)
One thing that comes to mind is I’m not unhappy to have this silly “virtual conference” code project on hand as we go forward. The ability to play around with different “dotted line” grouping seems more useful than ever now that we’re heading toward a world of two nationwide super-conferences.
The second thing for our purposes is: will there be any intra-California football after 2023? The Pac-12 may be dying but does the Mythical California Cup have to die as well?
These are the games we have on the schedule right now according to fbschedules.com:
- Fresno State at UCLA
- USC at UCLA
- SDSU at Fresno State
- SJSU at Fresno State
- SDSU at Cal
- Cal / Stanford… both teams have no conference schedule but assuming the world doesn’t end they’ll play a Big Game
And that’s about it. That would be the fewest (non-Covid) games in our dataset so far. Everyone except USC and Stanford would have a chance to win two games, so it’s possible we can crown a champ by our rules.
But that’s with Stanford and Cal having no conference games at all to play. The big question is what comes of that. Unfortunately with all the other California teams happily socked into conferences it doesn’t seem possible that we could quickly revive the Stanford-SJSU rivalry or have Stanford and Cal play the West half of the Mountain West. It seems insane that we’re really going to lose Stanford-USC in 2024. That series has been played 100 times, including every year since WWII ended. (Sometime twice a year in the championship era.)
So that’s where we’re at right now: threadbare but functional MCC schedule for 2024. Stanford and Cal below that line.