USC and UCLA still don’t feel like Big Ten schools, but move seems like it was inevitable

LOS ANGELES — Next door to the Wasserman Football Center on UCLA’s campus sits Pauley Pavilion, where some of college basketball’s greatest players have donned blue and gold and raised banner after banner.

It’s where Ed O’Bannon once played and led the Bruins to the 1995 NCAA championship. Two decades later, he won a landmark class-action lawsuit against the very institution that crowned him. The lawsuit filed in his name eventually paved the way for college players to be paid for their name, image and likeness.

As Bruins offensive line coach Tim Drevno walked up to greet me Tuesday morning at Wasserman, I thought about how much college sports had changed since that ’95 championship, but especially how much had changed for UCLA and USC.

I grew up in L.A. watching Marcus Allen’s Trojans and Troy Aikman’s Bruins, and I never dreamed they might leave the 108-year-old Pac-12 Conference for the Big Ten, maybe in the same way I never thought LeBron James’ son would sign endorsement deals that put his estimated valuation at $7.5 million — before he even started playing basketball at USC.

Or in the same way no one can dream, at least right now, of Michigan and Ohio State leaving the Big Ten for another richer conference.

Drevno and I grew up in L.A. at the same time watching the same teams in the Pac-12 (or the Pac-10 in our day). When news broke in June 2022 that UCLA and USC would join the Big Ten, we had similar reactions.

“I was like, ‘Oh, man, I love the Pac-12,’” Drevno said. “I’m a Southern California guy, growing up around it since I was a little kid.”

Then he thought more about the cataclysmic change and its specific benefits for UCLA.

“I was a little bummed out,” he said, “but I was excited.”

The Big Ten’s revenue from the largest media-rights deal in college history — worth more than $7 billion over seven years — would pay each L.A. school $80 million to $100 million annually. That far surpassed whatever deal the Pac-12 struggled and failed to put together.

The revenue’s big number solved a big problem for UCLA, whose athletic department had accrued $102.8 million of debt the previous three fiscal years. That put smaller, non-revenue Olympic sports in danger of being cut.

“I know change always has to happen,” Drevno, a former Michigan offensive coordinator, said, “and I thought it was an exciting time for UCLA and the football program, the university, just because the revenue that's going to help provide for the student athletes and the programs.”

Maybe more than most, Drevno understood the full implications. He spent three seasons from 2015-17 as Jim Harbaugh’s offensive coordinator at Michigan, where he got a full understanding of the cultural difference between the Big Ten and the Pac-12.

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“It’s a little bit different vibe just because I feel like a lot of those towns and cities back there, that's all they got,” he said. “That's their sports teams and they’re big college towns.

“Here it’s L.A. A lot of people are doing a lot of different stuff.”

After the L.A. schools left, Oregon and Washington followed. All four schools will begin play in the Big Ten next fall, though the Ducks and Huskies won’t receive a full share of media-rights revenue.

‘It’s not a way of life’

J. Brady McCollough is a sport enterprise reporter for the L.A. Times who has written extensively about the Pac-12’s demise. His exhaustive and definitive probe published in August (“Inside the Pac-12 collapse”) reads like a cross between a murder mystery, a spy thriller and a medical examiner’s autopsy of a person who didn’t have to die.

McCollough also fully understands the Big Ten. He graduated in 2004 from Michigan, where he covered sports for the school’s paper, the Michigan Daily. He also doesn’t think there’s a cultural connection between the West Coast schools and the Big Ten.

“It's not a way of life here like it's a way of life in the Midwest, in many locales, and certainly in the Southeast,” he said. “But college sports are not a way of life here.”

McCollough cited how Pac-12 football and basketball teams struggle with attendance, even when they’re playing ranked opponents, while Iowa set an NCAA women’s basketball attendance record last month when 55,646 fans watched the Hawkeyes play DePaul at Kinnick Stadium — in an exhibition.

But one person’s poor culture fit is another person’s quirky curiosity. McCollough already looks forward to seeing USC at the Big House on Sept. 21, or UCLA in a snowy November dogfight at Iowa at some point.

Even Drevno looks forward to facing his old Big Ten foes and, yes, even a 2026 return to Ann Arbor, where he misses the good times, his favorite restaurants and a five-minute drive down State Street to his house. His mother-in-law still lives in Ypsilanti.

“Yeah, that's gonna be a fun time,” he said. “There’s a lot of fun memories back there. Won a lot of games and stuff.

“To be able to walk into that place, the Big House, or to be able to go back to the Horseshoe — you coach for a reason. You coach to teach and mentor, but to give kids the opportunity to venture out and see something new and be able to walk in a venue like that and you're at the highest stage, there's something to be said for it. Because you coach for that, you're built for that, you want to do that, you embrace that.”

Did this have to happen?

The big question is did this even have to happen? Probably not, but with a sports landscape that only seems to grow more bountiful with every new TV deal, it was probably inevitable.

“It's the way of the world, it's how college football is,” said Rob Parker, former Free Press columnist and longtime media personality in Detroit and L.A. who works and teaches at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “Everything on the walls has been torn down. So I just think people might have a day of outrage, but move on because there's nothing they can do.”

McCollough outlined a scenario in which the Pac-12 could have continued. After Texas and Oklahoma announced in June 2021 they were leaving the Big 12 for the SEC, the remaining Big 12 schools were looking for a home and could have joined the still-intact Pac-12.

But even growing the Pac-12 conference probably would have been more like a stay of execution, rather than permanent salvation.

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“The Pac would have would have added the teams from the Big 12 that wanted to come to the Pac-16 or 18 or whatever it would have been,” McCollough said. “And then a year or two later, I still think the Big Ten would have come and poached the L.A. schools and very possibly, eventually Washington and Oregon, just like they did.”

That’s the depressing part for me. McCollough liked the idea of the Pac-Whatever continuing on as an angry, plucky underdog without its top four schools. To me, it seems the Pac-12 was doomed in a Groundhog Day scenario that would always end up with the conference ceasing to end as we know it. Mostly because of money.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” Parker said. “It's just financial.

“And who knows? Maybe a year from now maybe they will realize having traditions and having things that have been around for 100 years should matter, and they do matter.”

I’d love to think Parker is right. I’d love to think conference executives and school presidents would grow a financial conscience that soon. But that’s hardly realistic. Just ask Ed O’Bannon.

Contact Carlos Monarrez: cmonarrez@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: USC, UCLA still don’t feel like Big Ten schools, but move felt fated