Mark Kiszla: Don’t expect Deion Sanders to shed tear at Pac

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Colorado head coach Deion Sanders speaks during a news conference at UCHealth Champions Center on Aug. 4, 2023, in Boulder, Colorado. (Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post/TNS)

DENVER — As harsh changes in the economic climate wreak havoc on the college football landscape, Neon Deion Sanders burns hotter than the sun, chuckling as the Pac-12 Conference crumbles into the ocean.

These are crazy times to be alive in the college football world.

And the new Colorado coach was born to thrive in the madness.

“What craziness you talking about?” Sanders asked.

Well, a week after the Buffs bolted for the plains and returned to the greener pastures of the Big 12, the league that was recently their home is on its deathbed.

The earth quaked under the Pac-12’s feet again Friday, when Oregon and Washington got out while the getting was still good, running hat in hand to those long, ever-loving arms of the Big Ten.

“Yeah,” said Sanders, laughing at his detractors as hypocrites, “the same teams that talked about us, right?”

To these untrained eyes, it now seems all over for the Pac-12 except the crying by the last of those poor lost souls abandoned to fend for themselves. Call me a sentimental fool, but I feel sorry for Stanford and Washington State, whose programs are left to wander aimlessly in a new football zombieland that stretches from the Silicon Valley to The Palouse.

Just don’t expect Coach Prime to join me at the pity party.

“I don’t care about no different teams moving. We’re trying to win, man. I don’t care where we play,” said Sanders, whose Buffs will get a sneak peek at their future in the Big 12 when they travel to play Texas Christian on Sept. 2 in the season-opener.

The roots of the Pac-12 go deep, all the way back to 1915, when it began as the Pacific Coast Conference. The league’s storied history included tales of trailblazers as varied as baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson and Olympic icon Dick Fosbury, which has caused us all to hear hippy-dippy Bill Walton to roar its praises as the Conference of Champions until our ears bled.

Well, who’s going to speak the eulogy for the Pac-12? The bloom is off decades of tradition at the Rose Bowl, because everybody is chasing a payday. The math and the money no longer compute for a league that has lost five members since last year — and likely even more to follow. This ain’t your granddaddy’s idea of college sports, when a quarterback yet to throw a touchdown pass for the Buffs can drive a $200,000 Maybach through the streets of Boulder.

“All this about money, you know that. It’s about a bag,” Sanders said.

“Everybody’s chasing a bag. And then you get mad at the players when they chase it. How is that? How is it grown-ups get mad at the players when the colleges are chasing it?”

The big question now: How long before Arizona, Arizona State and Utah join Colorado in the Big 12?

While Sanders is comfortable in the knowledge that his Buffs stayed one step ahead of the storm that blew through the Pac-12 and left it for rubble, there’s no doubt in my mind that the beginning of the end of the league was when CU joined it a dozen years ago, when the revolutionary notion of monster conferences was in its infancy.

Way back then, the two football teams the Pac-12 really wanted were Texas and Oklahoma, which could’ve put the league ahead of the curve and atop the college football heap. The Conference of Champions, however, settled for adding Colorado and Utah. The decline began shortly thereafter. And here we are, preparing for a funeral.

I don’t know if that qualifies as irony, but all these years later, it certainly seems like a strange, fateful twist of the knife in the Pac-12’s back.

What always separated college football from the NFL and made Saturdays more enjoyable for fools like me were the fight songs that got alums on their feet in the stadium, allowing the suspension of disbelief and clinging to the naive notion that what transpired on the field was more about love than money.

Because it wasn’t all business all the time, there was even room for something as goofy as the Stanford tree. Now, if that tree falls in the forest in a great athletic wasteland and ESPN isn’t there to telecast, does it make a sound?

Well, all I know is you certainly won’t hear one whimper of sadness from Sanders.

Tradition doesn’t matter. All that does count? The scoreboard. And the bottom line.

“I don’t care what conference or who we’re playing against,” Sanders said. “We’re trying to win.”

It’s the end of the Pac-12 as we know it.

And Coach Prime feels fine.

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