Sports. Honestly. Since 2011

Chillin' In The West: Pac 12 Media Days

Once you have done the hotel banquet rooms and moved from the east and the south , through the Midwest, you eventually land on the West Coast for Pac 12 Media Days. And if you are going to go out west what else would you expect but to have the media conference on the lot of Paramount Pictures Studio in the midst of Hollywood.

Pac 12 Media Days

Here, the coaches don’t wear suits and ties to meet the media. They wear khakis and team polo shirts. They sit at a table and have causal Q&A sessions with whomever wants to talk with them, before heading outdoors to the main fountain to meet with the television folks.  The players don’t just talk with the media here. They take tours of the television and film production lots. They meet Jimmy Kimmel. They shoot promo videos and visit all the booths set up with food vendors and interactive games for their fun. There is even a shave ice tent with a different flavor for each time. Cougar Crunch sounds good. This is an event that used to be at the Sheraton Hotel near LA International Airport so that people could get in and get out quickly. Now it’s a LA style party.  If the SEC event this year was a circus, and the ACC event was a carnival, well then the Pac 12 was putting on a big city street fair full of West Coast swagger.

Those attending the two day event could be excused if they thought they were attending the announcement of a new digital media company. Pac 12 Commissioner Larry Scott opened the event with a glitzy digital presentation that could be mistaken for an announcement about a new App or Internet Operating System. To drive home that point Scott mentioned at least six times that the conference championship game was being moved to Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, or as Scott repeatedly put it, “…the heart of Silicon Valley, the home of great innovation.”

Steve Sarkisian talked about his return to USC, having been an assistant there under Pete Carroll, before taking the head coaching spot at the University of Washington five years ago. The Trojans are officially out from under NCAA sanctions now, but have a 65 player roster due to the scholarship limits. Sarkisian could not help but thumb his nose at the NCAA by mentioning more than once that during the NCAA penalty period, the USC football program raised more than $120 million in new contributions. Sarkisian also mentioned that just seven months into his return to the Trojans, he is already more comfortable with the setup at USC than he was at Washington, thus confirming the Huskies’ fans conspiracy theories that Sark was never all-in in Seattle. Don’t bother looking at the schedule for the match-up. USC and UW don’t play each other this year.

Speaking of UW, new Head Coach Chris Petersen talked about the idea of leaving behind Boise State after 9 years of success that flew around the mid-level of the radar, “My life got much tougher coming here with the toughness of this league.” It got a lot tougher here when Petersen announced that quarterback Cyler Miles will be suspended for the season opener against Hawaii, stemming from assault allegations going back to the beginning of the year

Arizona’s Rich Rodriguez talked about every school trying to improve their athletic facilities. “Oregon changes theirs out like porta-potties,” according to Rodriguez. He is in an interesting situation. In a local interview last week, UA Athletic Director Greg Byrne said the school wanted to give Rodriguez a few years to get his feet under him before ramping up the Wildcats’ schedule. This year UA has a non-conference schedule of UNLV, University of Texas-San Antonio and Nevada. Plenty of foot room for Rodriguez. And to make sure he also leg room, the school has zero out-of-conference games scheduled against teams from the Big 5 conferences until 2022.

Arizona State returns one of the better quarterbacks in the country in Taylor Kelly. Still the media picked ASU to finish third in the Pac 12 South behind UCLA and USC. Sun Devils Head Coach Todd Graham said he was happy with that. “You never want to be picked first because the media is never right.” Spoken like a coach whose team was picked to finish first last year in the Pac 12 South and finished third.

UCLA’s Jim Mora, actually picked to finish first in the South this season, addressed the issue of schedules and the new four team playoff, where strength of schedule is part of the formula. UCLA plays three of its first four games on the road, including out-of-conference games against Virginia and Texas. “I’d like consistency across the country. I like competition. I don’t understand a coach that doesn’t want to play against a great opponent each week. I understand that the ultimate goal is to win the national championship, but I would rather do it the hard way, not the easy way.”

Stanford’s Davis Shaw went one step further, indirectly targeting schools in other conferences, (well and maybe Arizona). Shaw said when it comes time for the four team playoff consideration, “if you are only going to play eight conference games and then wedge in some Division 1AA school in November in addition to your other out of conference games, it should not count the same as what other schools do.” Stanford, by the way, opens the season against agricultural powerhouse UC Davis. Hey, at least it’s not in November, right?

But before you go thinking this was all seriousness in the land of fun and frivolity, we present Washington State Coach Mike Leach; he of the knowledge of all things pirates; the co-author of the recently published book on Geronimo, which he describes as a look at leadership qualities of n American warrior. Leach warned reporters  the conversation would be more interesting if they asked questions about anything but football, because, “…I have to talk nothing but football for the next four months and I don’t want to déjà vu myself and wonder if I am repeating myself.” In between posing for pictures in a pirate hat and talking about which Pac 12 coach would be better to go on a bear hunt with, Leach discussed what it was like to coach and recruit in the frontier outpost that is Pullman, Washington and what that means for Cougar opponents. “I cannot guarantee anyone’s survival out there, but they have to come anyway.”

WSU quarterback Connor Halliday said of Leach, “There is no one else in the country like him.” Thank goodness we at least have Leach, because, hey, even cool, hip street fairs need entertainment.

 

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