SAN DIEGO — It's right there, written in black and scarlet.
If the Pac-12 — soon to lose at least two pounds and get back to its old, unwanted playing weight — is to survive, it doesn't want San Diego State to join. It needs San Diego State to join.
If it knows what's good for itself, which would be a switch from the way it's acted in recent years. These fast times are something other than eating pizza and learning about Cuba in class.
The Big Ten Plus Six and SEC are the Joneses, tough to keep up with these days, and the once-great conference now finds itself riding a Model T at Indy.
It finds itself in a box and needs some progressive little gray cells to start thinking outside of it. The Wizard has given way to the Lollipop Guild.
But a step down in class, losing USC and UCLA to the Big Ten in 2025, doesn't mean the smaller fish can't swim in a larger pond and endure.
It doesn't have to be on its last legs. If marketed properly, with the right surgery and therapy — and if some of its remaining schools learn how to recruit, coach and get better — it may lose some core strength, but it will be able to get out of the scum and walk out of that pond.
We just returned from a brief ocean voyage, so I had a bit more free time than usual (24 hours instead of 23 1/2) to think about this.
No conference is strong from roof to cellar in the revenue-making sports — football and basketball. As we speak, the Pac-12 still has Stanford, Cal, Oregon, Oregon State, Washington, Washington State, Arizona and Arizona State. Maybe Utah and Colorado will leave for the Big 12. Hell, everyone may bolt.
But if they hang together, the Pac-12-10-Whatever has to solve an enormous problem.
Roughly 24 million people — 7% of the U.S. population — reside in Southern California. There are but three Division I football programs — USC, UCLA and SDSU — within the region.
The conference simply can't afford to have vacant prime football acreage stretching from San Ysidro to Palo Alto. Thousands of great athletes grow and have grown out of this soil.
San Diego State has ranked football and basketball programs. Football is about to have a new stadium. Viejas Arena is big time. The student body is massive, and the campus will be expanding to the Mission Valley stadium site.
State's academic standing is growing. You just don't walk in anymore. The school received 76,792 freshmen applications, around 22,000 more from transfers, in the fall of 2021. Thousands of smart kids get turned away.
The league is going to be without L.A., the nation's second-largest media market. Because of that, being close by, San Diego's market size isn't near that despite its population. But it is America's eighth-largest city, No. 2 in California.
Diehard Aztecs fans have been yearning to get in that conference since Don Coryell was cowboying the likes of Mexico Poly.
State has been a Penelope, but without suitors, waiting for Odysseus to arrive. It's doubtful it's ever going to have a better chance than this. In this era of NIL, we're looking at the wide open spaces.
The City's Ham & Eggers have a way of screwing things up, but they don't play football and basketball, and J.D. Wicker is the first athletic director since Fred Miller who may dare to be great — and without Fred's proclivity for selling snake oil to a cobra.
Unless it merges with, say, the Big 12 (which right now doesn't want to hear it), the Pac-12 needs help, and in this case it's spelled A-z-t-e-c-s, who actually may have the ball in plus territory.
Run hard and smart. Don't turn it over, or play not to lose. And punting is not an option.
