Quote Originally Posted by U-Ute View Post

The push to expand the PAC-10 came from Larry Scott when he became commissioner. He saw the PAC-10 as stagnant, which was borne out by the TV contract.
This is true. The Pac-10 under Tom Hansen was a dinosaur. From the moment Scott became commish, the writing was on the wall about expansion.

What's not true (IMO) is the idea that Utah was always a safety school. Taken in a vacuum, the Pac-12 needed to get to 12 teams, and Utah/CU was always going to be that combination. What threw the idea of a Pac-16 into the mix was expansion elsewhere. The seeds were sown for Utah when Scott took over in July 2009. At that time, nobody envisioned the tumult that would come in the Big 12 with Texas A&M (and to a lesser degree, Missouri) leaving for the SEC. Plus, the Big 10 was really the tail wagging the dog, another scenario that developed in 2010.

Utah went from being one of two sane choices, to possibly being left out, and back to being one of two sane choices. If the Pac-12 would've gone to 16 schools in 2011, I'm not sure of a scenario existing that includes Utah, unless the Bay Area schools and USC don't compromise on academics and give Texas Tech the boot. Now, the league did just that with Baylor, as the CU invite was the league's way of saying not only no, but hell no to Baylor. But that wasn't going to turn off Texas. Turning aside Texas Tech might have done just that.

That's how I connect the dots. In the end, it doesn't really matter if we're Hawaii to Colorado's Alaska. We're in and that's all that matters.