Next week, chancellors and presidents from Pac-10 schools will meet in San Francisco and are expected to finalize what shape the two six-team divisions will take starting in 2011.
Earlier this week, it was reported that it’s been all but been decided that the divisional split will consist of a North/South alignment, with the two Oregon and two Washington schools in the former and USC, UCLA and the two Arizona schools in the latter. The only question seemingly remaining division-wise is what to do with the Cal-Stanford and newcomer Colorado-Utah pairings.
A slim majority of conference athletic directors -- 7-5 to be specific -- favor putting the two new schools in the South according to USC AD Pat Haden. Such an arrangement would put the Northern California schools in a separate division, bringing up the possibility that the Cali quadrant would not be guaranteed to play each other on an annual basis.
“I told (the rest of the athletic directors) my alumni will kill me if we don’t play the Northern California schools,” Haden said Wednesday at a booster club meeting. “I proposed a 5-2-2 model that has us playing the five schools (in our division) every year and then have the Northern California schools as part of our regular two and then rotate the other two.
“We need to play Stanford and Cal.”
Whether or not that need gets satisfied won’t be known until next week.
The 5-2-2 model Haden speaks of would certainly satisfy a portion of the conference, but almost assuredly not the four non-Cali schools in the proposed Northern division. Such a model would likely cut at least one trip annually to the fertile recruiting grounds of California, which those Northern schools will almost certainly resist at every turn.
And, based on commissioner Larry Scott’s non-guarantee to the California schools a week ago, we wouldn’t be holding our breath of we were Haden.