The Pac-12 has an extremely lucrative TV deal with Espn/Fox...etc. Everyone in the conference is making substantially more money than they were before. The Pac-12 network was also launched and that has been largely unsuccessful.

CB only posts about the latter. As a result, the board collectively expects the conference to be run out of business at any moment...in spite of the billions of dollars of the current deal.

USC still has clout and money. If you look at their history they've been up and down. To pretend they were a top 5 team every year and suddenly with Utah in the conference they're falling apart. USC was already in trouble and banned from post season play before the Pac expanded. I think the challenges and expectations shortfalls have more to do with the aftermath and consequences of their own doing.

The Pac-12 is a strong conference. Again, the CB narrative is that if you're not dominating the SEC and Big 10 schools, you're a failure. I'd say the downside to the Pac-12 is the parity. Every school has won in the South. Every school in the north has been ranked in the top 15 at some point.

No other conferences do that. They're all controlled by the 2-3 programs that at the top that dominate.

Because of the parity, it's hard to run the table and win when playing 9 conference games and 5 conference road games every other year. Even the best USC teams of old would drop a road game.

But if you look at the Pac this year, almost every lower/middle tier school has a win over a Big 10, SEC or Big 12 school. If those schools were so superior, they wouldn't be losing to CU, Arizona, Stanford, Arizona State.

Case in point is Utah. As it stood last week, most people believed a 1-loss Utah would get in ahead of a 1-loss Big 12 and SEC school.

That's not a conference on the decline.