It’s a Batman cartoon, or John Madden in his 1980s heyday at CBS, commenting on a hit or a devastating block.
It’s most like a sprawling and drunken barroom brawl.
The Pac-12, especially in the South, is wild and chaotic, straight from a John Wayne movie. Guys are staggering around, delivering punches in one moment, and then being tapped on the back before someone else decks them in the face.
The crazy part is that we’re just starting the nine-game conference season in the West. So many more battles await, the next big one being the California-Utah clash this weekend. One must immediately ask two questions about the Pac-12 at this relatively early point in the conference season:
1) Will the real versions of teams please stand up?
2) When the real versions do stand up, can you stay upright instead of running into an ambush minutes later?
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Blowouts — especially road blowouts — certainly create the impression of one-way traffic and a clear competitive hierarchy.
Last weekend, the Pac-12 blew up not just because of the lopsided results in the league, or the fact that Oregon — the main standard-bearer — was annihilated at home by Utah. The specific fact which jarred Pac-12 watchers was that three different runaways were all won by road teams. Utah did the deed in Eugene, yes, but UCLA — coming off a rather shaky win at home against BYU — looked like an elite team in a thumping of Arizona. The Bruins beat the Wildcats like a dirty, old rag. USC — which looked hopeless and clueless on defense the week before against Stanford — turned into a mighty outfit with an authoritative thumping of Arizona State in Tempe. Two years earlier, Lane Kiffin’s last game against Arizona State was a 62-41 loss, the result which ended his USC career. The 2015 game couldn’t have been more different.
Arizona State must have been in huge trouble after that game, we all thought.
Naturally, just one week later, the ASU team many of us had been waiting for showed up in Pasadena. It thoroughly outplayed UCLA in a 38-23 win which was both more dramatic and more lopsided than the final score indicated. Mike Bercovici looked reborn — or restored to his 2014 self. The Sun Devils’ energy was consistent with the way the team played for the balance of the 2013 and 2014 seasons. UCLA’s identity as a team with national championship chops lasted exactly one game and one week. Josh Rosen was mortal again, and the Bruins are left to wonder what kind of team they really are.
Later on Saturday night, another roundhouse punch was delivered. Stanford, the same team which scored only six points against Northwestern, now has an offense which can’t miss. The Cardinal are locked in on the offensive side of the ball. Kevin Hogan failed to complete only two passes in another masterclass on grass, this one against an Arizona defense which is hemorrhaging so far. The defending Pac-12 South champion is the one non-Colorado team without a conference victory at this point in the season. California and Utah, as they prepare for Saturday, are the only two unbeaten teams in the league.
This means that after week six — less than halfway through a season with 14 full game weekends (not including Army-Navy) — only one Pac-12 team will still be unbeaten overall and in the league.
Will order be somehow restored in this crowded and unruly barroom environment… or will the roundhouse punches keep flying (and connecting on cheekbones) from all directions?
As John Wayne himself might say, “We’ll just have to find out… PILGRIM!”