Pac-12 Just Had One of the Worst Months in Recent College Basketball History
With a 1-2 record thus far, the Pac-12 is off to a slow start in this year’s college football bowl games. But the conference’s basketball counterparts had an even worse December.
Pac-12 basketball teams suffered five losses on Saturday, with all five coming against mid-major schools.
The poor showings guarantee that the Pac-12 will finish the month with a win percentage below .600, according to ESPN. No Power Five conference (or the Big East) has finished December with a win percentage that low in 20 years.
With one game in December yet to be played, the Pac-12 has gone 38-36 in the month for a .514 win percentage. Its previous worst December came in 2009, when the conference, then known as the Pac-10, posted a .613 win percentage.
It’s worth noting that the conference schedule doesn’t start until the new year, so many of the games have been against foes from outside of the major conferences.
The poor month was reminiscent of this past March, when the conference went winless in the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1986.
“Saturday was the third time this season that the Pac-12 has had two days when its teams lost at least five nonconference games,” ESPN reported. “In the previous 20 seasons, that happened only twice.”
The Pac-12 hasn’t always been this bad. As recently as 2017, the conference sent four teams to the NCAA tournament, with three of them receiving top-three seeds. And UCLA has won more men’s basketball titles (11) than any other team.
But in perhaps the worst of the five Saturday losses, UCLA was beaten at home by Liberty, 73-58.
The Liberty Flames have an 11-4 record, but they were 0-3 this season against teams in the Power Five conferences plus the Big East.
“This might be one of the most disappointing games I’ve had,” UCLA coach Steve Alford said afterward. “Trying to reflect back throughout 28 years (as a coach), the word ‘disappointment’ of just our team and how we performed — I don’t know the last time I was this disappointed in a team. It did not look like us on any level.”
No. 17 Arizona State was the Pac-12’s only team tanked in the top 25, but they will likely drop out of the rankings after losing to Princeton 67-66.
Princeton entered the game with just a 6-5 record and was thrashed by 51 points in their only other matchup against a ranked team this season. But they went into the Wells Fargo Arena and defeated an ASU team that had just beaten the No. 1 team in the country, Kansas.
“There’s no positives to this at all really, that I can think of at the moment,” Arizona State coach Bobby Hurley said, according to The Associated Press. “Just the kind of nonconference that we had and the level of wins that we’ve had, this is a step back. But if we’re going to play like this, then the resume isn’t going to mean a whole lot. … You can’t be one team against the No. 1 team in the country and then play this way.”
College sports have always lacked the parity that comes in pro sports, but Hurley suggested games like this show that parity is becoming the norm in college basketball.
“There is nothing good that can be taken from this,” Hurley said. “We took a step back. There is a lot of parity in college basketball. If you’re not ready to play, you’re going to get beat.”
The other three Pac-12 teams to lose Saturday were Utah, Washington State and Cal.
The Pac-12 conference schedule will start on Jan. 3, so teams will soon have a chance to beat up on one another instead of having mid-majors beat up on them.
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