The Pac-12 Sucks

The Crew, though they seem to be pretty good at handicapping it, is not particularly enamored with college hoops. It's largely plodding and boring, featuring far too many dudes for whom the two-handed set shot seems to be a go-to move and far too few who can finish at the rim or play with their back to the basket. The talent level, overall, is pedestrian and the product is almost unwatchable.

That's especially true concerning the Pac-12, which opened league play tonight having not a single team ranked in the RPI top 50, only two teams (Arizona and California) ranked in the top 100 and two ranked outside the top 200 (ASU and Utah).

The main reason behind the dreadful numbers is simple: everyone sucks. The PAC as a whole, in fact, finished the non-conference schedule 2-20 against the RPI top 50, something you'd normally see out of horse shit conferences like the MAAC or SWAC. As a result, the conference will almost certainly not get more than one team in the NCAAs, rendering anything that happens between now and early March an 18-game playoff for seeding to a winner-take-all Pac-12 tournament.

Think we are exaggerating? Consider that Arizona, the conference's highest ranked team at 56, owns exactly one win against the top 100, which came at home against Duquesne, who's 88th. If Lute Olson were dead, he'd roll over in his grave. And there's no way, of course, to improve upon that since they won't play another top 50 team the rest of the way because the conference is so bad.

If it were to turn out that only one team were to indeed make the field -- and it will -- it'll be the first time since the tournament went to 64 teams (it's now 68) in 1985 that a BCS conference would send only one representative. Ridiculous.

Quite a fall considering only a few years ago it was perhaps the most talented conference in the country, with a combined 12 players going in the first round of the 2008 and 2009 NBA drafts, including six in the lottery. Today, an AAU team would run some of these squads out of the building.