The Pac-12 South entered 2015 with a legitimate claim as the toughest division in college football, tougher than the SEC West.
This might have had more to do with the SEC West faltering in bowl games than the Pac-12 South being transcendent, but the bottom-line debate was legitimate.
If you lined up all seven teams in the SEC West, and put them against the six teams of the Pac-12 South, you would have had some decisions to make. The SEC West (Alabama over Arizona at the top, Arkansas over Colorado at the bottom) had a few clear advantages, but from teams two through five, the Pac-12 South was a little bit stronger.
In many ways, the debate which never had a chance to be resolved from 2014 was this one: UCLA or Ole Miss? A game between those two teams would have been the perfect argument-settling slugfest from the past season. Alas, that wasn’t possible (because the bowls limit the scope of matchups relative to certain conferences), and so in 2015, the Pac-12 South needed to prove that it could hold its own on the field, showing the staying power we have in fact seen from the SEC West in previous years. This was and is true on a national level, of course, but the Pac-12 South also had to stand up to the Pac-12 North.
Thursday night in Palo Alto, Calif., the Pac-12 South fell hard, putting the capper on an absolutely brutal sports week for the city of Los Angeles.
What started with the collapse of USC on Sunday with the Steve Sarkisian-Pat Haden mess (by the way: Why has Haden not been shown the door yet?), and continued with the Dodgers’ very familiar playoff exit at the hands of the New York Mets, culminated in UCLA’s tissue-soft performance in a blowout loss to Stanford.
It’s not a very good time to be an Angelino in athletics, and as far as the Pac-12 is concerned, the Bay Area schools have done the improving this season, not the Southern California schools. If UCLA can’t get off the deck next Thursday in a home game against California, the Pac-12 South will have some ground to make up — relative to the North — over the last several weeks of the season.
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The fact that Stanford won is not any particular point of shame for UCLA. The Bruins were playing without Myles Jack and Eddie Vanderdoes, among others. They lacked the defensive pieces to fully combat Stanford’s vastly improved offense, whose performance against Northwestern is beginning to acquire a certain kind of status as far as aberrational performances go:
With each passing week, Stanford's loss to Northwestern looks like Ohio State's 2014 loss to Va. Tech. Playoff era is all about improving.
— Jon Solomon (@JonSolomon35) October 16, 2015
The alarming dimension of this game is that UCLA collapsed, and offered very little resistance in the face of Stanford’s toughness… precisely when the Bruins should have been ready to be resilient, resourceful and resolute — all the things they weren’t last Thanksgiving Friday, when a big accomplishment was just 60 minutes away.
Recall what happened in the ninth and final Pac-12 game for UCLA and Stanford last season. UCLA just needed to win at home to wrap up the Pac-12 South title. Stanford limped into the game with a 6-5 record. The Bruins — this is important to note — were on the verge of achieving something, and over the past 17 years, they’ve failed to achieve at a meaningful level whenever they’ve had the opportunity. That they faced Stanford’s weakest team under David Shaw — the weakest in several years on The Farm — gave them no excuse for failure.
After taking a 10-7 lead early in the second quarter, UCLA was simply trucked by Stanford over the game’s final 40 minutes. The Bruins were shut out, and the Cardinal rolled to an easy 31-10 win which reaffirmed UCLA as “The New Clemson” in college football.
#BRUINING is the new hashtag we should all embrace right now, even though Jim Mora — so full of bluster, so eager to throw someone else under the bus when something goes wrong — would probably not be able to face up to that reality.
Isn’t that right, sir?
https://twitter.com/TheCauldron/status/654894525081481216
It’s true that Utah might be the best team in the Pac-12 South. Moreover, for those who think Stanford is clearly the best team in the league, Utah has been pure poison for the Trees, the Harvey Updyke of the Pac-12 the last two seasons. Utah beat Stanford in 2013 and 2014, and that’s with teams clearly inferior to this one. The Utes have the physical defense which can man up against the Cardinal’s power sets and rugged approach.
However, while Utah might be the class of the Pac-12, it’s hard to deny that the Pac-12 South doesn’t have many other legs to stand on. USC and Arizona State need to make big statements in the coming weeks, and the Trojans certainly don’t seem to be in a good position to do so.
This is shaping up to be the year of the San Francisco Bay Area in Pac-12 football, and that point was driven home on a night when Stanford ran its record against UCLA to 8-0 over the past seven seasons. The schools have played every year since 2009, and met twice in 2012 due to a repeat rendezvous in the Pac-12 Championship Game.
Jim Mora, Jr. is now 0-5 against David Shaw, which isn’t itself a point of shame; the fact that UCLA got undressed by Stanford last season, and then showed absolutely no discipline in a laundry-laden flag festival of a reunion, is what should rightly humiliate the Bruins.
A few short weeks ago, UCLA was a 13-point favorite to beat Arizona State at home and affirm its place atop the Pac-12 South. Now, the Bruins are emblematic of how their division has plummeted in stature relative to the Pac-12 North and a resurgent pair of Bay Area schools.
There’s still time for the Pac-12 South to reclaim its reputation in the coming weeks, starting next Thursday with UCLA’s game against Berkeley. However, the margin for error is rapidly dwindling in a part of the country that was supposed to be a lot tougher than it has been in the first half of the 2015 college football season.
