Cal, Stanford fans lament demise of Pac-12, loss of generations of tradition

Aug. 7, 2023
Updated: Aug. 7, 2023 8:19 p.m.
The shocking news that the once all-powerful and glorious Pacific-12 Conference would soon be whittled down to the Pac-4 made it a sad Monday morning for quarterbacks already gearing up for the college football season.
“Cal and Stanford have a great sports history, and they are being treated as irrelevant. I really worry about both of them,” said Joe Starkey, the longtime California Golden Bears football radio broadcaster who now describes himself as a Cal fan. “It is breaking the fans’ hearts more than anything else, but I think we will rally around the school. We’ve been mistreated, and we deserve better.”
The mistreatment started last spring when University of Southern California and UCLA announced they were abandoning the conference for the larger TV payoff of the Big Ten. The Regents of the University of California put up a fight, and even Gov. Gavin Newsom weighed in to keep UCLA from bolting. But ultimately it relented, and once the dominoes started falling, they fell fast. First, Colorado announced a return to the Big 12 Conference from where it came.
The Pac-12 was suddenly down to the Pac-9, which is just one more than it had in the late 1970s when expansion began by adding Arizona and Arizona State, both of which expanded stadium capacity in order to gain admission to the old Pac-8. Then they both announced their departure for the Big 12, taking the Pac-12’s newest member, Utah, along with them.
Finally, Oregon and Washington made the move that had been expected, and followed USC and UCLA to the Big Ten. So now it is just Stanford, Cal, Oregon State and Washington State. By Monday morning, the Pac-12 logo had appeared as a meme on an internet message board as the Pac-4, above the logo “Conference of Champions.”
Neil McKinnon saw that on social media Monday morning, and it did not improve his mood. McKinnon grew up on the Stanford campus where his father was a professor of economics. McKinnon started riding his bike to games when he was 8. Jim Plunkett was the new quarterback and Gene Washington his favorite receiver. A crowd of 86,000 for a home game against Cal or USC was standard. The glory of bowl games continued through his own class of 1980, and decades of tickets thereafter. He attended two Sun Bowls, in 1977 and 1996, and four Rose Bowls. He is a loyalist but also a pragmatist. On Friday morning, he was accepting of the Pac-9, but by Friday afternoon, it was the Pac-4.
“This is a function of years and years of neglect by the Stanford athletic department and administration all the way up to the board of trustees,” said McKinnon, who gave up his tickets in 2021 because he was an economics major and could see what was coming.
“Stanford went from a position of strength to a group that was largely irrelevant to major college football,” he said. “I’m sure the Big Sky Conference would be happy to have Stanford as a member and play Sacramento State and UC Davis.”
There is also a rumor Stanford may go independent, like Notre Dame, thereby creating the Pac-3 and a new meme logo. This would leave Cal alone with the smallest two programs in the smallest two cities in the conference, Oregon State and Washington State.
“I am in TOTAL SHOCK,” wrote Cal alum and booster Greg Overholtzer in a mass email he sent out to Cal fans, spelling out 12 things the Pac-12 conference leadership did wrong to get to this point. “I hope that The Big Ten is still willing to consider Cal, as other options will likely decimate many of the sports programs due to large decreases in annual revenue streams.”
Revenue streams and smaller sports are off in the distant future. The near future is the loss of multigenerational family traditions in attending big-time college football games.
“It’s the total destruction of any real football on the West Coast,’’ said Chuck Evans, a former Stanford lineman who played in two victorious bowl games in the 1970s and ended up such a Stanford fan that he was associated with a Cardinal-red van parked in Chuck Taylor Grove for home games. He played on a Stanford team that tied USC when it was ranked No. 1. Because he was from Southern California, there were 20 or more family members there to witness it at the Los Angeles Coliseum. To have that rivalry gone is devastating for the program from a financial standpoint and from a traditional standpoint,” he said. “All the old rivalries are out the window.”
Jeffrey Earl Warren, a third-generation Cal graduate, first attended Cal games in the 1950s, with his grandfather Chief Justice Earl Warren. After playing wide receiver, Warren graduated in 1970, and had season tickets starting in 1983 when he moved to St. Helena to sell vineyard land. He tailgated with a group of 50 and any Pac-8 or Pac-10 or Pac-12 game always added excitement.
“The Washington game and the Oregon game were both huge,” he said, “but the main ones were UCLA and USC and Stanford. Now everything is gone.”
Memorial Stadium, which Warren maintains is the most beautiful stadium in the country, has a $400 million loan to pay off for its remodel. Warren is a former trustee of the UC Berkeley Foundation and has seen the numbers.
“Cal will certainly cut many sports, and they may cut football,” he said. “If they don’t, they should form an academic conference with Cal, Stanford, Northwestern, Rice, Duke, and maybe the service academies, Army, Navy and Air Force.”
There is precedent for it. Brad McBride’s first Cal game was against Navy, in 1964, with Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach against Craig Morton. McBride, class of ’79, was there with his father, Clark McBride, class of ’55.
“Cal won 27-13,” said McBride, who can still remember that score through the fog of Cal games through the years, always starting with the Bear’s Lair, where they’d gather to follow the marching band up through campus to the stadium.
“It’s kind of devastating if you are a traditionalist,” said McBride, who struggled to find the silver lining in the fact that Cal has not been to the Rose Bowl since 1959, the longest drought of any team in the soon-to-be old Pac-12.
“I told my dad, ‘Hey, maybe Cal can go to the Rose Bowl next year because they won’t have much competition,’ ” he said.