Is an expansion of the Pac-10 conference in the works?”
With potential conference expansion again all the rage, first-year Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott knew the question would be coming. What about Pac-10 expansion? Kirby Lee/Image of Sport/US PresswirePac-10 conference commissioner Larry Scott said he is considering expansion… again. “Expansion is something we will take a look at,” Scott said Wednesday. For expansion enthusiasts that will sound like a more open-minded approach than long-time commissioner Tom Hansen, whom Scott replaced over the summer. But don’t make plans for a Pac-10 Championship Game just yet. Yes, expansion is something Scott will look at with a “fresh set of eyes” — his phrase — and the timing makes sense because the conference television contracts expire after the 2011-12 academic year. But this is nothing new — he said the same in July before Pac-10 media day — and the same reasoning and sentiments that school and conference administrators have used to resist calls for expansion in the past remain entrenche
On the gulf shores of Florida, and in San Francisco, and in Kansas City, the nation’s biggest college athletic conferences are staging their summer meetings this week. They’ll talk about scheduling and media guides and a lot of other mundane things. But over dinner and in the bars late at night, one topic will be a lot splashier, and nobody will be nodding off: conference realignment. If that’s a vague concept, some of the related possibilities aren’t: You might see Colorado teams playing regularly on University of Washington campus venues. The last weekend of the regular season in football might be reserved for a Pac-10 championship game. Or your cable package might feature a channel on which you could see the Huskies playing softball every weekend, or the Cougars playing baseball. In a recent interview, The Times asked Larry Scott, the Pac-10 commissioner just concluding his first year in office, how he envisions the general makeup of the nation’s conferences in a year. “There will b
