A College Football Season Unlike Any Other in the Pac-12

As College Basketball finishes off another crazy and chaotic March Madness in Houston for the Final Four, I couldn’t help but notice that we are less than 150 days away from the start of the college football season. Just like with the Big Dance, college football teams all over the country are hoping and dreaming to have the type of season that gets them to college football’s final four. As the 2023 season rapidly approaches, the Pac-12 conference is about to embark on one of the wildest seasons in conference history.

While the biggest story in the conference has been the fact that this will be the last time USC and UCLA will be Pac-12 members before moving to the BIG Ten, there’s an even bigger storyline going on. There’s a legitimate case to be made that the Pac-12 will be the best conference in college football this season. That’s right, you heard me, the Pac-12. I’m not Bill Walton, claiming that Cal should be in the CFP just because they went 4-8, but this conference is as deep as any in the country, and has some real CFP contenders.

The coaching changes throughout the conference have opened windows of success unprecedented or unmatched in decades. Coaches like Lincoln Riley, Deion Sanders, Kalen DeBoer, Jake Dickert, Dan Lanning, and Johnathan Smith have brought a sleepwalking conference back to not just relevancy, but a chance to be elite. Heading into the 2023 season, it is expected that we will see seven teams ranked in the preseason top 25, with anywhere from two to four teams ranked in the top 12.