PAC’D WITH HISTORY


By any name, the Pac-12 has produced nearly a century of great football By Phil Barber


I


n 1915, Professor C.M. Lynch, the faculty athletic representative at Berkeley—what was then the sole campus of the University of California—had a big idea. In December of that year, he gathered officials from the University of Oregon, Oregon Agricultural College (later Oregon State University), and the University of Washington to make a formal proposal at the Oregon Hotel in Portland. “Gentlemen,” Lynch said, “the time has come to or- ganize our own conference and to broaden the scope of college athletics in the Far West. It has become perfectly clear that the problems are awesome.”


The thing is, he couldn’t have known how awesome the results would be. There is simply no way Lynch and his nattily attired cohorts might have envisioned Bob Waterfield and Aaron


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Rodgers, Hugh McElhenny and Haloti Ngata, Stanford’s Vow Boys and Arizona’s Desert Swarm defense, not to mention the 29 national football champions, 10 Heisman Trophy win- ners, 46 Rose Bowl victories, and 102 College Football Hall of Fame inductees for which they were paving the way. Or the one bent trombone.


Lynch’s plan was a bold one back in 1915, considering that colleges at that time couldn’t agree on something as fundamental


as the definition of “football.” Some staged a sport closer to rugby than anything Red Grange would ever play. The schools’ new Pacific Coast Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, generally known as the Pacific Coast Conference, sought to standardize the game.


The PCC began play in 1916, and one of its four football teams was already an established dynasty.


Ernie Nevers


This was Gil Dobie’s ninth and final season coaching at Washington, and he would leave the school with- out ever losing, going 58–0–3. Dobie’s streak of 61 consecutive games without


a loss remains an NCAA record. Washington and Oregon played to a scoreless tie in the PCC’s first season, and both finished unbeaten. The


Tournament of Roses Committee selected Oregon for its bowl game because getting a team to Pasadena from Eugene, Oregon, via rail was $250 cheaper than it was from Seattle. The Ducks beat Pennsylvania 14–0. Dobie, as it happened, coached just one year in the PCC. President Henry Suzzallo fired him after the 1916


Stanford University


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