A win for the college sports industrial complex

In sports activities, as in the remainder of life, change is the one fixed. If that weren’t true, College of Washington soccer followers would nonetheless be rooting for a workforce known as the Solar Dodgers.

Simply over a century in the past, that identify was modified and UDub athletes turned the Huskies. Even earlier, earlier than there was any mascot in any respect, our native college turned a founding member of the Pacific Coast Convention. Now, 108 years later, the most recent incarnation of that league — the PAC 12 — could also be fading into sports activities historical past as Washington joins a number of different universities in forsaking the venerable West Coast athletic collective.

Custom is one factor, cash is one other. And cash nearly at all times wins — particularly large quantities of cash. School athletics have profoundly modified because the days when the Solar Dodgers held their gridiron matches on the long-gone Denny Discipline towards rivals similar to Whitman School and Oregon Agricultural School (now OSU). At this time, faculty soccer is a multibillion-dollar enterprise pushed by media giants like Fox and ESPN.

With no deal to seize a big share of these billions, a college can not keep a top-ranked athletic program. At numerous key moments during the last decade, the parents in control of the PAC 12 — together with many supposedly sensible college presidents — fumbled the ball. Because of this, TV income was flowing away from the West Coast groups and towards these in different aggressive configurations, particularly the Huge Ten and Huge 12.

Chasing the cash, USC and UCLA had been the first to announce their intention to go away the Pac 12. That opened the exit door for Washington and Oregon to comply with them into the Huge Ten and for Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah to leap to the Huge 12.

Pragmatism says UW President Ana Mari Cauce made a wise alternative. The Huskies had no capacity to beat the titanic sports activities industrial complicated, they might solely be part of the large recreation or turn out to be far lower than the perennial contender they’ve been for thus lengthy.

Nonetheless, sports activities out right here on the sting of the Pacific won’t ever be the identical once more and outdated rivalries — particularly the storied competitors between the Huskies and the Washington State Cougars — will probably be completely diminished. As Jackson Browne sang, “All good issues received to come back to an finish.” However that doesn’t imply we’ve got to love it.

See extra of David Horsey’s cartoons at: st.news/davidhorsey

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