Whatever Happened to This Conference?? - The Pacific Coast Conference* (This is claimed as always being same conference by the Pac-12)

Conference realignment is seemingly never going away in college football and it has become a topic of constant conversation. Due to this uncertainty, we started to wonder what happened to conferences in college football’s past and how they fell out of the picture. We will take a brief tour of some defunct/renamed conferences, explore their members, give a brief summary on how the conference fell apart and where everyone wound up after the conference disbanded.  

The Pacific Coast Conference

The Pacific Coast Conference (PCC) was a college athletic conference in the United States which existed from 1915 to 1959.

This is going to get a little tricky here as the Pac-12 Conference claims the PCC's history as part of its own, with eight of the ten PCC members (including all four original PCC charter members) now in the Pac-12 (for at least this 2023 year now).

The older league, the PCC, had a completely different charter and was disbanded in 1959 due to a major crisis and scandal. Also they operated under a totally different name for nearly 10 years!

So technically you disbanded the conference and you have a new name and new charter, we are crediting totally new conference here.

The PCC was established on December 2, 1915, its four charter members were the University of California (now University of California, Berkeley), the University of Washington, the University of Oregon, and Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State University). It eventually housed 8 of the 10 teams originally in the Pac-10.

Pacific Coast Conference Timeline

The original formation of the conference housed the Cal Bears, Washington Huskies, Oregon Ducks and the Oregon State Beavers at its inception in 1915.

In 1917, the Washington State Cougars joined the PCC, upping the conference to 5 members.

A year later in 1918, Stanford joined the PCC (although not called the Cardinal at the time, they had a Native American mascot which was dropped in 1972). This increased the PCC to 6 members.

In 1922, the University of Idaho and the University of Southern California (USC) both joined the conference. The PCC increased to 8 total teams.

In 1924, USC was suspended from the conference. Rumors began circulating that USC was paying cash to recruits and not requiring players to be academically qualified students. Although the requirements for player eligibility were relatively minimal at that time, paying players and failing to enforce academic requirements were clear violations of the conference bylaws. This lead to some incredibly fighting over these allegations. On November 1, 1924 the Trojans were in Berkeley to play the Bears. Before the game, Cal officials met with USC officials and informed them that California and Stanford had jointly decided to sever all athletic relations with USC at the end of the football season. Here’s a blog about it if you wanted to go more in depth. (The Year USC Caused Stanford to Play a Home Game in Berkeley)

Also, in 1924, the PCC welcomed a new member in the Montana Grizzlies. After the suspension of USC was completed the PCC was now at 9 total members.

In 1928, the 10th and final member of the PCC was added with the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

The PCC membership was set, through 1950 at least…

Here’s a graphic of the 1957 PCC Preview in Sports Illustrated.

Total Pacific Coast Conference Championships

• Cal - 12

• USC - 12

• Stanford - 8

• UCLA - 6

• Oregon - 4

• Washington - 4

• Oregon State - 3

• Washington State - 2

• Idaho - 1

• Montana - 0

Look at this happy beveled Pacific Coast Conference. (We decided to omit the Native-American Stanford mascot at the time and threw in an S Logo they used in the 1960s instead.)

The Pacific Coast Conference Breaks Up

The first of the PCC members to leave the conference was Montana in 1950. In 1948, the Montana board of education announced that it was de-emphasizing athletics at the state university. Key to the university's decision was the feeling that continued affiliation with the PCC was incompatible with the goal to "keep intercollegiate athletics properly subordinated to the academic function" and they would "seek to develop competition in all sports with institutions similar in purpose, size, resources and academic standing." The conference was only "preferable to having no conference affiliation.”

In 1951, Montana joined the Skyline Conference (our substack on that Conference What Happened to the Skyline Conference), and competed there until the conference dissolved in the summer of 1962. The Grizzlies never had a winning season in the Skyline and never won more than three games until 1960. In 1963, Montana joined Gonzaga, Idaho, Idaho State, Weber State, and Montana State in forming the Big Sky Conference, where they remain till today.

The PCC was now down to nine members.

In 1956, there was something called “The Crisis” according to the Wikipedia heading. This was the beginning of the end for the PCC.

A scandal first broke at Washington, when in January 1956, several discontented players staged a mutiny against their coach, John Cherberg. After Coach Cherberg was fired, the PCC followed up on charges of a slush fund. The PCC found evidence of the prohibited activities of the Greater Washington Advertising Fund run by Roscoe C. "Torchy" Torrance (what a nickname), and in May imposed sanctions on Washington. Amazingly, Cherburg wound up winning the Lieutenant Governor of Washington election later in 1956 and many other elections. (We’re going to dig into this specific thing more but for now, we will just leave it at this point)

Later in March of 1956, allegations of prohibited payments made by two booster clubs associated with UCLA, the Bruin Bench and the Young Men's Club of Westwood, were published in Los Angeles newspapers. UCLA refused for ten weeks to allow PCC officials to proceed in their investigation. Finally, UCLA admitted everything and said all members of the football coaching staff had, for several years, known of the unsanctioned payments to student athletes and had cooperated with the booster club members or officers, who actually administered the program by actually referring student athletes to them for such aid.

Then later that year, the crisis grew further and further when an UCLA alumnus and member of the UCLA athletic advisory board blew the whistle on a secret fund for payments in violation of PCC rules to University of Southern California players, known as the Southern California Educational Foundation. This same alumnus also blew the whistle on Cal's phony work program for athletes known as the San Francisco Gridiron Club, with an extension in the Los Angeles area known as the South Seas Fund.

In 1957, the conference fired Vic Schmidt, the commissioner. He had been tasked with cleaning up the conference, and had imposed sanctions on UCLA, including suspending athletes and prohibiting participation in the Rose Bowl for three years.

The PCC was falling apart, leading to the decision to dissolve after the 1958–59 season.

Soon after the PCC was dissolved, five of its nine members (California, Washington, UCLA, Southern California, and Stanford) created the Athletic Association of Western Universities (AAWU) for the 1959 season.

After initially being blocked from admission, three of the four remaining schools would eventually join (Washington State in 1962, Oregon and Oregon State in 1964), but members were not required to play other members.

Idaho was not involved in the scandals but had become noncompetitive in the PCC. Unlike Washington State, Oregon, and Oregon State, Idaho did not pursue AAWU admission, and competed as an independent before becoming a charter member of the Big Sky Conference in 1963 and rejoined a conference with Montana.

The AAWU eventually strengthened its bonds and added members, renaming itself the Pacific-8 Conference (Pac-8) in 1968. By 1971, most Pac-8 schools played round-robin conference football schedules, and the two Oregon schools were again playing USC and UCLA on a regular basis. The conference added WAC powers Arizona and Arizona State in 1978 and became the Pacific-10 Conference (Pac-10). In 2011, the conference added Colorado from the Big 12 and Utah from the Mountain West and became the Pac-12. Which now we also know USC and UCLA will be leaving for the Big Ten in 2024.

The Pac-12 claims the PCC's history as its own, though it operates under a separate charter and was called the AAWU for about 10 years. They can claim it all they want but we consider it technically a seperate conference.

Sound off in the comments below if you’d like us to review what occurred in another defunct conference.