Alexander: Is diminished USC-UCLA game another reminder of what we’ve lost?
The world according to Jim:
• As we approach the latest edition of USC vs. UCLA – in other words, a 5-5 team against a 4-6 team, their game Saturday at the Rose Bowl shunted to a 7:30 Pacific time slot so people in the Eastern half of the country who don’t have a bet on the game need not bother – the question must be asked: Are there people in those athletic departments who have buyers’ remorse over the move to the Big Ten?
And will that remorse only increase as the travel horror stories involving non-football programs’ conference travel pile up? …
• Here’s a reminder of the reason for this displacement, as well as the only thing that seemingly makes it make sense: The L.A. schools are getting full shares of the Big Ten media pie, somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 million a year, as the first programs to jump the Pac-12 ship on the final day of June, 2022. Given the way former Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff subsequently botched the conference’s media rights negotiations, which began the mass exodus, the L.A. schools’ move in retrospect was understandable if regrettable. …
• Hey, it is more expensive to live in L.A., right? …
• Oregon and Washington, among the last to defect, get half shares for the balance of the Big Ten contract, which runs through the spring of 2030 (although Phil Knight’s largesse almost certainly helps offset the difference at Oregon). The teams that scattered to the Big XII and Atlantic Coast Conference similarly received reduced shares from their new conferences. Oregon State and Washington State have been living off the Pac-12’s surplus and a stopgap TV deal and teamed with Octagon this week in search of a new media rights agreement for the rebuilding conference. …
• On the football field, at least, it has been an unqualified triumph for Oregon, undefeated and currently at the top of the College Football Playoff pecking order. Washington is 6-5 overall and 4-4 in the Big Ten. The L.A. schools are reduced to playing for bowl scraps. And the idea that Washington, USC and UCLA are respectively eighth, 12th and 13th in their conference is its own special kind of culture shock. …
• We’ve had more than a year to get used to it, but I still miss the old Pac-12 and its regional rivalries. That’s not going to change for a good, long while. …
• Meanwhile, Ole Miss’ Lane Kiffin said the quiet part out loud the other day, as he is prone to do. His team’s on a heater – 8-2 overall, 4-2 in the SEC, No. 9 in the last College Football Playoff rankings and winner of three in a row, including a 28-10 thumping of then-No. 3 Georgia. Yet in an expanded SEC that – like the Big Ten – no longer has divisions and sends its first- and second-place teams to the conference championship game, Kiffin said he wanted no part of that 13th game and a potential third loss that would knock his team out of playoff contention. He indicated other SEC coaches had similar feelings. …
• In other words: The bloated nature of the current Power Four conferences – and, as former colleague Mark Whicker noted in his Substack column, the realization that contenders don’t all play each other because of that bloat – has already made the 12-team playoff unwieldy and borderline obsolete.
Nice work, guys. …
• And let the empha$i$ on the bottom line, both among athletic programs and among those players getting NIL money, be one more reminder that the NCAA’s insistent reference to “student athletes,” parroted by its member schools, is as big a fallacy as ever and maybe more so. Reverse the order of that phrase and it’s closer to the truth. …
• The other aspect of what at first glance seems to be a diminished crosstown rivalry – at least until the game starts and the emotions on the field take over – is that one coach, UCLA’s DeShaun Foster, is digging out from the Chip Kelly era, and his team has already displayed progress this season. The other, USC’s Lincoln Riley, is drawing comparisons to predecessor Clay Helton among some alumni – and that’s not good. …
• The Rams will be honoring their 1999 team, which won the franchise’s first Super Bowl for St. Louis, at Sunday evening’s game against Philadelphia at SoFi Stadium.
And if you are an L.A. Rams fan, all in on the team once again, do you really care about the ’99 champs, never mind willing to celebrate them? Or is there still a void between the team’s departure for St. Louis in 1995 and its return to Los Angeles in 2016? (The Reddit conversation from this past May, “What Is Your Opinion of Georgia Frontiere,” indicates where longtime L.A. Rams fans stand on this.) …
• From the “things I wish I’d written” file, Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins’ wonderful description of the monstrosity that was the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson “fight” a week ago:
“Was Jake Paul’s not the most punchable face in the history of punched faces? It was a face with all the character and lived experience of a canned ham. It was the consummate face of an influencer, with all the smirky grifting in search of the lux life that term suggests. There wasn’t a hint of true toughness — much less truth — in it. Just blandness cloaked in a poseur-pharaoh’s beard and topped by some box-color bleached curls, and God did you ever want Mike Tyson to put his very real fist in it.”
Priceless. …
• The ball from Freddie Freeman’s World Series Game 1 walkoff grand slam, grabbed by 10-year-old Zachary Ruderman of Venice – who was told he was leaving school early that Friday to go to a orthodontist’s appointment only to have his dad take him to Dodger Stadium instead – is going to be auctioned off by SCP Auctions from Dec. 4-14. It should fetch seven figures, easy, maybe even more than the $4.392 million top bid last month for Shohei Ohtani’s 50th home run (which is currently held up by a dispute over who actually had the right to auction it). …
• If I could afford to make the winning bid on Freeman’s ball – and if I actually could, you wouldn’t be reading this column – I’d lend it to the Dodgers to prominently display among their MVP and Cy Young and Silver Slugger trophies, with the stipulation that it would eventually go to the Hall of Fame. That’s where it belongs.
Now if someone could just find the Kirk Gibson ball from 1988. …
jalexander@scng.com