There have been a lot of surprises in our time as a Pac 12 team. But one of the surprises that is up there has been the decline of the conference as a basketball conference in general.
I remember how stoked I was when we got into a P5 conference, thinking that it would be nice to finally be in one of those conferences that gets 4-6 invites annually rather than 2 or 3.
And the P12 decided to holistically underperform for most of the next 12 years. In fact, am I remembering correctly that our first or second year in the conference we only got one team in – Washington?
I expected to get in a lot more regularly as long as Utah stayed in the top half of the league. How many times have we been a top half team and NOT gotten an at-large? I didn’t see that coming as a member of the Pac.
There are a lot of reasons we’ve missed the Dance since 2016. I didn’t think conference strength would be one of those reasons.