With apologies to William Shakespeare, Alas poor Pac-12. I knew the league, football lovers. No, this conference hasn’t been dead for many years like Yorick in Hamlet, but the league isn’t far from having last rites administered if it cannot find a way to partly replace UCLA and USC when the two most important members leave for the Big Ten.
San Diego State and Fresno State might stop some of the leakage. There has been talk that the league might go after Houston and SMU to get some of the Dallas and Houston markets, but neither team commands huge numbers of the two largest cities in the Southwest.
What this league must worry about is that potentially eight of the remaining teams could try to leave this league.
2022 might produce some irony. In recent seasons, there has been too much parity to produce one undefeated team. In fact, there has never been an undefeated Pac-12 team in the regular season, not even in conference play only. The last time a team ran the table in the league and in the regular season, the league was the Pac-10, when Oregon played Auburn for the National Championship in 2010.
There is a team capable of ending that 12 year drought. Read on to see which team it is. The other big news is that the league has eliminated the two divisions.
Preseason PiRate Ratings For Pac-12 Conference
| Team | PiRate | Mean | Bias | Average |
| Utah | 116.4 | 114.9 | 118.3 | 116.5 |
| Oregon | 111.6 | 111.3 | 110.8 | 111.2 |
| U C L A | 108.5 | 108.4 | 110.1 | 109.0 |
| Oregon St. | 107.1 | 106.5 | 107.7 | 107.1 |
| U S C | 105.3 | 106.1 | 106.1 | 105.8 |
| Washington | 104.1 | 104.9 | 105.4 | 104.8 |
| Arizona St. | 104.0 | 104.0 | 105.3 | 104.4 |
| Stanford | 103.7 | 100.9 | 101.7 | 102.1 |
| Washington St. | 100.9 | 101.5 | 101.7 | 101.4 |
| California | 97.6 | 98.0 | 99.0 | 98.2 |
| Colorado | 98.4 | 96.6 | 97.6 | 97.5 |
| Arizona | 94.0 | 94.0 | 93.9 | 94.0 |
| Pac-12 | 104.3 | 103.9 | 104.8 | 104.3 |
Pac-12 Official Preseason Media Poll
| Votes | |||
| # | Team | 1st Place | Overall |
| 1 | Utah | 26 | 384 |
| 2 | Oregon | 2 | 345 |
| 3 | USC | 5 | 341 |
| 4 | UCLA | 0 | 289 |
| 5 | Oregon St. | 0 | 246 |
| 6 | Washington | 0 | 212 |
| 7 | Washington St. | 0 | 177 |
| 8 | Stanford | 0 | 159 |
| 9 | California | 0 | 154 |
| 10 | Arizona St. | 0 | 123 |
| 11 | Arizona | 0 | 86 |
| 12 | Colorado | 0 | 58 |
The PiRate Ratings are designed to look at just the next week’s schedule of games and not to use to look forward. Nevertheless, here are the predicted won-loss records for the league.
Predicted Won-Loss Records
| Pac-12 | Conf | Overall |
| Utah | 9-0 | 13-0 |
| Oregon | 8-1 | 10-3 |
| UCLA | 7-2 | 10-2 |
| USC | 6-3 | 8-4 |
| Washington | 5-4 | 7-5 |
| Oregon St. | 5-4 | 8-4 |
| Washington St. | 4-5 | 6-6 |
| Arizona St. | 4-5 | 6-6 |
| Stanford | 3-6 | 4-8 |
| California | 1-8 | 3-9 |
| Arizona | 1-8 | 2-10 |
| Colorado | 1-8 | 1-11 |
The Pi-Rate Ratings 