The PAC-12 as we know had its curtain call last night in the conference championship game between the Washington Huskies and the Oregon Ducks.
You could not have asked for a better finale to the PAC-12, with Washington pulling off a come-from-behind victory and punching their ticket to the College Football Playoff with a 34 to 31 win. It’s really too bad that the PAC-12 fell apart, because this has been one hell of a year for the conference.
Last night’s game was all you could want in a conference championship game, but it did make some sad that the reign of the PAC-12 is coming to an end. The only remaining colleges in the once great conference are Oregon State and Washington, and those two teams have finalized a “truce” of sorts with the Mountain West conference.
Every other school that was in the west coast conference effectively made this year their swan song as they plan to move to different conferences (and create logistical travel nightmares) next season. Stanford and Cal, who are both located in California, will now play in the ACC (Atlantic Coastal Conference), which as you may know, has a geographical footprint on the complete other side of the United States.
But enough about the fall of the PAC-12 empire, why don’t we revisit some of the great moments that the conference will leave behind in the annals of college football history? That’s what everyone else has been doing on social media, and though I’ll include more of the PAC-12’s best moments below, I want to focus on one specific bright spot for a moment.
During a game in the 2011 season between the Arizona Wildcats and the UCLA Bruins, a big-brained streaker took things to a complete other level. With only seconds before halftime, and UCLA trying to drive down the field (it was already a lopsided game), an Arizona fan dressed as a referee ran out onto the field frantically blowing a whistle.
Everyone stopped for a moment, and some of the other referees even came to the fan playing dress up to confer on why the whistle was being blown. Once they got close enough, they realized the referee was an imposter (the baggy-ass shorts must have blown his cover), and the streaker went sprinting down the field (to the 40, the 30, the 20…).
For some reason, the moment also sparked a fight between Arizona and UCLA, so the referees had to get their heads back on straight in order to get in the middle of the scuffle and break it up. It was truly a chaotic college football moment, and one that will live on in the history book of the PAC-12 (which isn’t technically dead, it’s just going to look different).
Take a look:
College football is the best.
And like I said earlier, there have been plenty of other PAC-12 moments that have popped up online as the conference rides off into the sunset. I saved you the trouble of having to search for them and went ahead and gathered some of the best below:
