(Written by kencraw)

If you think the big news on Thursday June 10th, 2010 is that USC is getting a two-year post-season ban and losing 20 30 scholarships over a yet unknown period of 3 years, you are absolutely, moronically wrong (not that there’s anything wrong with that!).

The Big News is that Colorado has officially joined the Pac-10.

Thirty years from now, the USC news will be a footnote, the Pac-10 expansion will be a key moment in the conference.

People have asked what I think about the “Pac-16” (or I’ve heard it referred to as the SAT (surf and turf) conference) and I haven’t completed a post on the subject because I can’t make up my mind. But here’s what I am confident of, I have no interest in the Pac-12 with Colorado and Utah. That scenario loses all that is special about the Pac-10 with its round-robin and natural rivalries without gaining enough in return. So I guess at this point, I just became a proponent of the Pac-16 since the only alternative is either the Pac-12 or even worse, the Pac-11, now that the Colorado announcement is official.

As for the Pac-16, I like the fact that we’re looking at a Pac-8 division in the conference. That’ll work out nicely. I like the fact that the conference championship game will help us in publicity as a conference. I also like the fact that we’ll get access to the Big-12 bowl lineup which is far better than the Pac-10.

However, there are some downsides. We end up losing some bowl slots in bowls that formerly had both a Pac-10 and Big-12 alignment. They’re not going to keep two slots, so the combined conference will lose a spot. If it was only one bowl, but it’s 2 1/2: Alamo, Holiday, and Sun every other year. Add that to the fact that there’s going to be a whole lot of extra competition for those bowl slots and it’s at least a bit worrisome that perhaps the added bowls won’t be enough to improve the situation for the existing Pac-10 teams. I’d want to see the bowls be forced to pick fairly based on team success and not just “pick in order”, which gets very complicated with a two division conference.

I’m also VERY against conference games against the other half that COUNT (and I can’t emphasize this enough) for who is the division champion. I’d love to play Texas every few years, but I most definitely don’t like the idea that the year that we play Texas in Texas ends up being the year we’d otherwise win the Pac-8 division except for that loss sinking us. The same goes for Oklahoma. No, it better be just the 7 games in the division that determine the division winner. I hate, hate, HATE how the current 12 team conferences do it and it’ll be even worse with 8 teams because at most there will only be 2 out-of-division conference games and there’s just no way to “balance” those games so that it doesn’t unduly affect the division standings.

So, from where I sit, if we either only play 7 conference games or if we play 8 or 9 but only the 7 within the division count for the division standings and our new bowl alignments are significantly better than our current alignments (so much so that even though we’ve got these extra teams and lost a few spots, we’re in better shape), then I’d be happy if the Pac-16 came to pass.

Particularly now that the deed is done with Colorado and expansion is officially underway.