Pac-12 Friday began 3.5 years ago as our ongoing look at the Conference of (real NCAA) Champions we’re sorry to say we will be shuttering it down come Spring 2024 as the decline of Western Civilization continues—in the form of college sports’ cannibalization of itself due to corruption and greed. With just one more weekend of conference regular-season action for football, here’s what we see as serious news.

After being shafted repeatedly by the Bowl Championship Series and the College Football Playoff over the last two decades, the Pac-12 is going to get a team into the final 4-team “tournament” during its final year of existence. The league that allegedly couldn’t generate enough TV revenue for football is having its finest season in quite some time, collectively, and it’s going to go out with a bang—much to the chagrin of others.

The conference’s overall winning percentage heading into this final week of play is .586, thanks to a 78-55 combined record for its 12 teams. That’s the best season since the conference posted a .590 winning percentage in both 2013 and 2014—the first year of the CFP, when the Oregon Ducks made it to the championship game before losing to the Ohio State Buckeyes. It will be hard to deny the Pac-12 in 2023.

Nine of the 12 teams were ranked at one point this season, and both the Washington Huskies and the Ducks—the only two teams to ever rep the league in the CFP, sadly—have an excellent shot being in the Final Four when the dust settles on the conference championship, come December 1 in Las Vegas. In a worst-case scenario, both teams would lose their final regular-season games in rivalry matchups—and then it’s moot.

That probably won’t happen, though: the Huskies are huge favorites at home over the Washington State Cougars in the Apple Cup, and the Ducks are expected to beat the Oregon State Beavers in Eugene as well. If both predictions hold to form, then the two teams have a rematch of their October 14 game—won by Washington in Seattle—to decide the last Pac-12 football title … and earn a bid to the CFP, in the process.

The No. 4 Huskies escaped with a 36-33 victory last month when the No. 6 Ducks made too many mistakes at the end and lost their lead. On a neutral field in Sin City, it will be another down-to-the-wire game, for sure. If Washington wins out, it goes to the CFP with a 13-0 record. Even if the Huskies lose to the Cougars somehow but beat the Ducks, they’d probably still make it into the CFP due to the inevitable chaos ahead.

The Ducks would not make it to the CFP with two losses, so they need to be careful against the dangerous Beavers. But a 12-1 Oregon squad definitely moves up two spots in the rankings to secure a CFP bid, leaping over the Huskies and one of the B1G teams ahead of it. So a lot is on the line in the next 8 days, and it will be fun to watch. But what about the down-ballot squads in the conference? Where do they end up in the end?

Well, the surprise of the year has to be the Arizona Wildcats: currently 8-3 and favored to win the Territorial Cup against rival Arizona State. The Wildcats have won 5 straight games to rise to No. 16 in the nation, when no one expected much from this squad: Arizona hasn’t had a winning season since 2017, and the school posted just a 1-16 record in 2020 and 2021 combined. But here the Wildcats are, ready to pounce.

If Oregon State loses to Oregon, the Beavers will finish 8-4, and that will be a disappointment after last season’s 10-3 campaign that was capped by a dominant 30-3 win over Florida in a bowl game. The school also faces the uncertainty of what conference it will find a permanent home in after this season and rumors about its head coach leaving for more competitive situation(s) elsewhere. Time will tell for the Beavers.

Interestingly enough, the two most dominant programs in the history of the conference are struggling to also-ran finishes in 2023: both UCLA and USC will end up in mediocre bowl games despite high expectations—especially for the Trojans, who were No. 6 in the preseason Associated Press mediot poll. Even Utah, which won the past two league titles, struggled this year, surprisingly, despite that momentum.

With the Utes a preseason No. 14 pick, we see three teams here with a lot of potential that just struggled against each other this season—in the second tier of the conference hierarchy. USC and Utah especially had aspirations to make the CFP, and UCLA certainly was geared up for more. As the old adage goes, they just got beat up by the toughness of this league in 2023. But perhaps no one came up short like WSU did, sadly.

The Cougars, like the Beavers, are facing an uncertain future, and when WSU started out 4-0, it rose to No. 13 in the AP poll. It looked like maybe it was time to show the world something. But then the Cougs … well, they Coug’d it, as we often have said since the early 1990s days of Usenet. WSU lost 6 straight games, including 3 when they could have won or tied the game in the final minute, and that was nails in the coffin.

In the end, the Pac-12 will go out with a positive season, overall; it could have been better, perhaps, but with at least one team in the CFP—there’s a remote chance both Oregon and Washington could make it if they both end up 12-1 and other chips fall strangely—the legacy of the Conference of Champions in football will finish on a higher than note than it has in the last handful of CFP-free seasons from 2017-2022. Amen.