OSU women's basketball: Pac-12 Conference women's basketball deserved better (2024)

In the seven months since it was announced that the Pac-12 Conference was breaking apart, there have been moments when that reality hit especially hard.

This week is another one of those moments.

The 2024 NCAA women’s basketball tournament started Thursday and it is simply not possible to tell the story of the sport without the Pac-12/Pac-10.

Even before the women’s NCAA tournament began, Ann Meyers led UCLA to the 1978 Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women national championship. The NCAA started running the women’s tournament in 1982 and Southern Cal, led by Hall of Famer Cheryl Miller, won championships in 1983 and 1984.

Stanford won its first national championship in 1990. The Cardinal won for the third time in 2021, coming out on top of an all-Pac-12 matchup against Arizona. Tara VanDerveer, the team’s coach for this entire span, this year became the winningest coach in college basketball history, men’s or women’s.

Stanford has long been the benchmark on the West Coast, but part of what makes the breakup of the conference so frustrating is that the quality of play across the conference was getting better. Programs that had not previously invested in the sport or had lost their way were back in the game.

Southern Cal is a No. 1 seed in this year’s tournament. Stanford and UCLA are both No. 2 seeds. Oregon State is a No. 3 seed. Colorado and Utah are both No. 5 seeds. And Arizona, which finished seventh in the conference standings, was seeded 11th and played in Thursday’s First Four. The Wildcats defeated Auburn to advance.

When the Associated Press announced its all-American teams, Southern Cal’s JuJu Watkins and Stanford’s Cameron Brink were named to the first team. Oregon State’s Raegan Beers and Utah’s Alissa Pili were named to the third team.

Even President Joe Biden is a fan of the Pac-12. His picks for the women’s bracket put Oregon State, Utah, Stanford, Colorado, UCLA and USC in the Elite Eight, with UCLA and Stanford in the Final Four.

Nationally, interest in women’s college basketball has never been higher. Iowa’s Caitlin Clark has emerged as a superstar and has helped grow interest in the sport. But women’s college basketball has been on the rise for years, boosted by players such as Oregon’s Sabrina Ionescu.

But now, just as things are getting really interesting, Pac-12 women’s basketball as we have known it is coming to an end so that a few of the league’s members can cash bigger checks from a different conference.

In an interview Sunday after Oregon State was announced as a No. 3 seed in the tournament, star guard Talia von Oelhoffen spoke about how important it was to her growing up in the Pacific Northwest to watch the Pac-12 and be able to dream about playing at that level one day.

That dream is going away and von Oelhoffen blamed that on a “failure of leadership.”

She is correct.

Next year, former Pac-12 teams will travel to the Midwest and even the East Coast to play their conference games. Oregon State coach Scott Rueck and his squad will play a more sensible, but less lucrative, schedule in the West Coast Conference.

No one leading any of these women’s basketball programs prefers this or is responsible for this. The coaches, their players and the fans all deserve better.

Perhaps after this wave of realignment passes the leaders of big-time collegiate athletics will find a way to separate football so that other sports can be organized in a way that makes more sense. I hope so, but putting things back together after they’ve been broken isn’t always easy.

I don’t know if any team in this tournament can keep South Carolina from winning its second title in the past three years. But if any team can, it would be fun if it was a team from the Pac-12, to show for one last time that this was a conference which deserved to continue.