In some ways, Pac-10 football is the ultimate definition of a "rotisserie" league.
Every school, it seems, will experience a season to sizzle in the spotlight -- and a time to shrivel when the competition is too intense. In the 2001 Rose Bowl, Washington was the seventh different school to represent the conference in Pasadena in as many seasons.
That span of parity, the decline in the programs at USC and UCLA, and a mediocre 1999 non-conference record led to some speculation that Pac-10 football was slipping.
As former Arizona coach Dick Tomey puts it: "If USC and UCLA aren't the lead dogs, then everybody thinks (the Pac-10 is) down. We were 12-1 in 1998; I didn't think the conference was down then.
"We've had teams dominant for a season, or a couple of Top 10 teams, but not sustained dominance. That speaks to the parity, the balance in the conference."
Last season was a banner year for the league. Conference co-champions Washington (No. 3 in ESPN/USA Today), Oregon State (No. 5) and Oregon (No. 9) finished ranked in the Top 10. It was the first time three Pacific Northwest teams finished 1-2-3 in the conference standings since 1941. The Pac-10 finished 26-10 (.722) in non-conference play overall and 25-10 (.714) against Division I-A foes -- including a 3-2 postseason record. Among Bowl Championship Series conferences, only the Big East (25-9, .735) had a higher winning percentage against Division I-A foes last season.
The league rebounded from a mediocre 1999 season. The Pac-10 lost the Rose Bowl for the seventh time in eight seasons (Stanford lost to Wisconsin in the 2000 gala). Oregon won the Sun Bowl, but the Pac-10 had a 1-4 record in bowl games overall. The regular-season featured embarrassments: Stanford lost its season opener 69-17 at Texas; Penn State buried Arizona 41-7; Ohio State romped over UCLA, and Washington lost games to BYU and Air Force.
Those losses and barely .500 (20-18) non-league record are distant memories for some of the conference's most ardent supporters.
"You have, in essence, six major conferences in the country. There are great programs in every one of those conferences. But top to bottom, we've got the greatest balance, really, us and the SEC," Oregon assistant coach Neal Zoumboukos said.
"I don't think that's true of the other four conferences. They have some dominant teams and some not so good, exactly where we were 10 or 15 years ago."
Pac-10 football is benefiting from rule changes that put it on a more even plane with non-league schools in the recruiting wars.
"I was concerned about the league a couple of years ago," said Jerry Pettibone, Oregon State's coach from 1991-1996. "A couple of things were hurting the Pac-10 in recruiting."
At one time, the Pac-10 had restrictions about "training table" meals -- buffet-style dining important to most college students on a budget.
"In most conferences, you can feed your team one meal a day where they could go to a training table, all year round. In the Pac-10, there was a rule allowing the training table only during the season." League football players budgeted a food stipend the rest of the season.
Did it make a difference in recruiting pitches? Washington's Rick Neuheisel told the Eugene Register Guard last year that he used the Pac-10's policy against the league when recruiting at Colorado.
"It was absolutely a focus, and why shouldn't it be?" he said. "If everything else is even, and you're down to the wire in recruiting, and one place is going to feed you year around and the other is not, that makes sense to moms and dads as well as student-athletes."
Last season the Pac-10 adopted a rule to provide meals year round.
Pettibone, who coached the Beavers from 1991-96, also thinks the conference suffered when it adopted a rule governing coaches' access to high school games. According to Pac-10 assistant commissioner Jim Muldoon, beginning in 1991 the league's coaches voted to forbid their staffs from scouting Friday night games during October. They maintained that the assistant coaches should be with their current players, not watching potential prospects, at that time of the season. But Muldoon said the coaches rescinded the rule after only three seasons
This season Oregon is the West Coast media's pick to win the Pac-10 title, a first in the 40-year history of the preseason poll. Oregon State is expected to finish second and UCLA -- loser of 15 of its past 25 games -- is expected to finish third. Washington, the defending Rose Bowl champion, is slated for fourth.
"I think it's going to be hard for any team in the conference to be consistently in the national picture," Tomey said. "That's a good thing for the Pac-10, because you have so much balance. USC, UCLA have the population advantages, and Washington the historical advantages. But even those people are going to have a hard time" dominating the conference in recruiting and in the standings.
Sheldon Spencer is an associate editor at ESPN.com.
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