The First Time the Western Conference FellHow the breakup of the Pac-12’s predecessor echoes today’s events.

When Oregon Staters watched the Pac-12 Conference disintegrate this summer, leaving OSU and Washington State alone in the wreck­age, it seem­ed unprecedented: A solid part of the sporting world had crumbled. But Beavers have gone through this before.

In the late 1950s, a series of events led to the dissolution of the Pac-12’s predecessor — the Pacific Coast Conference — leaving Oregon State without a conference home for five consecutive years.

The PCC included eight of the 12 universities involved in the realignment happening now. Many issues that roiled intercollegiate athletics then are still at play, from paying players to market sizes, to money in general.

The particulars of the PCC dissolution and the Pac-12 breakup aren’t identical: the PCC situation involved dramatic differences in institutional philosophies on governing intercollegiate athletics, and the money issue was more about ticket sales than television revenue. But the result was the same: Decades of history and tradition among the West Coast’s highest-profile universities were tossed aside as a conference splintered. Then and now, an Oregon State football program that had gained national prominence was left to face an uncertain future.

The parallels offer interesting insights into the situation Beavers find themselves in today.

SCANDALS AND SUBTERFUGE

The dominoes of the PCC’s demise began falling in 1951, when University of Oregon head coach Jim Aiken was forced to resign because he’d been compensating players and using a “Football 101” class as extra practice time.

That set off a chain reaction of allegations and dismissals. In January 1956, the University of Washington fired head coach John Cherberg; burning bridges as he left, Cherberg told the press about a booster group that paid Husky players. A round robin of finger-pointing ensued. Universities accused one other of providing outlawed extra benefits to football players, including fake work programs in which they were paid to do nothing. (At that time, the PCC did not allow athletic scholarships, while many other conferences did.) By 1957, numerous student-athletes had been declared ineligible and the conference had penalized the Univer­sity of Washington, UCLA, University of Southern California and UC Berkeley (California) with bowl bans and fines.

We wanted students playing at athletics, not athletes playing as students.

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The PCC was known as a conference that strongly valued academics above athletics, investing governing authority in its faculty athletic representatives — one faculty member from each school — rather than the athletic directors or presidents and chancellors.

“We wanted students playing at athletics, not athletes playing as students,” said Robert Sproul, UC Berkeley’s president from 1930 to 1952 and the president of the entire University of California system from 1952 to 1958.

But some fans and many in the press, particularly in Southern California, wanted to loosen the grip of the academic side. One of the leaders of the PCC’s faculty athletic representatives, the University of Oregon’s Orlando Hollis, was villainized by Los Angeles media and referred to as “Orlando Hollis, Avenging Angel and well-known inventor of unworkable athletic codes” by Ned Cronin of the Los Angeles Times.

College football historian Mark Schipper put it this way in an August interview with Portland journalist John Canzano: “The football powers saw the big stage — major-college football — while schools like Oregon, Oregon State, Washington State and, at that time, Idaho saw a much lower ceiling and wanted to bring the big powers down to their level.”

The conference’s larger schools were also weary of smaller Northwest schools receiving more ticket revenue from their away games than they were giving to the larger schools when they played in Corvallis, Pullman and Eugene. In 1957, after USC, UCLA and California announced their intention to depart the PCC, Sports Illustrated magazine observed: “The ostensible reason for the schools’ withdrawal was the refusal of the PCC to approve their athletic policies. A more likely reason lies in the ABCs of fiscal football: the University of Michigan or, say, Oklahoma is a much better bet to fill the 100,000-plus seats in Los Angeles Coliseum than Oregon State or Washington State. After June 30, 1959, when California’s withdrawal becomes effective, the three California colleges can freely schedule the colossi of the South and Midwest to the pleasing whir of turnstiles.”

Not as big a factor as ticket sales, but quickly making inroads, was television. The first sports color telecast took place in 1951, moving sports into a whole new age. Oregon State President A.L. Strand noted in the December 1954 Oregon Stater: “Our budgets have become so dependent on such things as Rose Bowl and TV receipts that athletic directors shudder at the mere thought of losing that source of easy dollars.”

As football historian Schipper commented: “In many ways it is slightly different circumstances but a direct parallel to what’s happening today out West.” 

Any attempt to drive a wedge between Oregon State College and The University of Oregon would only hurt us both.

THE CONFERENCE BREAKS APART

By 1957, the four California schools and big-city Washington were making noises about forming their own conference, one run without interference from faculty representatives. In December 1957, PCC Commissioner Victor Schmidt — charged with enforcing the harsh penalties the faculty athletic representatives had levied — resigned under fire.

Not long after that, President Strand wrote UW President Henry Schmitz, acknowledging the differences between Oregon State and Washington in size and setting, but noting that as a founding member of the conference, Oregon State had a right to be heard. Strand’s letter (provided by former University of Idaho archivist Ben Camp) sounds as if it could have been written in the past year:

“The conference was formed, like all other such organizations, on a geographic basis and the intervening years have not changed that strong factor in bringing the institutions together,” he wrote. “Air travel has greatly extended the range of football teams, but basketball, baseball, track, swimming, tennis and golf are still beholden to geographic limitations. All of these sports, which are minor to football, are important to our athletic programs and any disruption to them will be seriously felt by all our institutions …. In the long run, don’t your fortunes lie with your friends in the north?”

Other animosities were also at play within the conference. In Games Colleges Play, author John Thelin writes that in the last decade of the PCC, “intercollegiate football became the vehicle that drove other political agendas in higher education, including power struggles within the University of California (between Cal and UCLA), keen campus rivalries within the city of Los Angeles, and pride that pitted California against the states of Oregon and Washington.”

The schisms had grown too large, and on Aug. 10, 1958, in Portland — where Oregon State, Oregon, Washington and California had formed the conference in 1915 — the PCC unanimously voted to dissolve after the 1958–59 season. Almost immediately, USC, UCLA, California and Washington formed the Athletic Association of  Western Universities, which Stanford joined soon thereafter. (Rumor had it, Oregon State was to be invited as well. See “When one wouldn’t leave the other,” for more about how the Oregon schools ended up sticking together.)

Members of the new AAWU declined a strong central authority. In lieu of the oversight they so disliked, they would be expected to adhere to a sort of honor code when it came to NCAA regulations. Glenn Seaborg, the UC chancellor, summed up the new process in Sports Illustrated: “If a member institution has reason to believe that another is violating either the letter or spirit of [the new rules], it may undertake to resolve the differences by discussion with that institution … You might say a man-to-man challenge.”

The changes left Oregon State, which had won or shared the last two PCC football titles, without a conference. Competing as an independent in the early 1960s, the Beavers experienced one of the golden eras in the university’s athletic history, highlighted by Terry Baker’s 1962 Heisman Trophy and a Liberty Bowl victory; men’s basketball’s three NCAA tournament appearances and spot in the 1963 Final Four; the 1961 NCAA cross country championship; and baseball finishing in the national rankings in 1962 and 1963.

In 1962, Washington State was invited to join the AAWU, but OSU and Oregon were still on the outside. On March 31, 1964, the announcement came that the Beavers and Ducks would rejoin their former conference mates that summer and be eligible for the Rose Bowl beginning that fall. Indeed, the Beavers took the 1964 AAWU crown and earned a berth in the 1965 Rose Bowl.

A History of OSU’s Sport Conferences

All photos courtesy of OSU Special Collections and Archives.

1915: Oregon State forms the Pacific Coast Conference with UO, UW and California. Competition begins the next year. 

1957–58: Oregon State wins back-to-back PCC football titles, going to the Rose Bowl in 1957 and tying for the title the following season. 

1959–63: After the PCC dissolves, OSU thrives as an independent school: winning championships in cross country; finishing in the national baseball rankings in 1962 and 1963; and appearing in three NCAA men’s basketball tournaments and the 1963 Final Four. 

1964: OSU earns a berth in the Rose Bowl the Beavers’ first year in the Athletic Association of Western Universities. (The name is officially changed to the Pacific-8 in 1968.) 

1980–82: Oregon State’s “Orange Express” wins three consecutive Pacific-10 men’s basketball titles, breaking UCLA’s string of 13 straight championships.

1986: The conference expands to include women’s sports. OSU wins its first Pac-10 women’s gymnastics title in 1991, the first of four in a six-year stretch.

2000: OSU is part of a three- way tie for the Pac-10 football championship. Beavers beat Notre Dame 41-9 in the Jan. 1, 2001, Fiesta Bowl. 

2015: OSU wins the Pac-12 women’s basketball championship, the first of three in a row for the Beavers. In 2016, OSU also wins the conference tournament.

2018: OSU wins its third NCAA Division I Baseball National Championship, defeating Arkansas in the 2018 College World Series.

2023: The Pac-12 collapses. Only OSU and WSU will remain in the “Pac-2” as of the summer of 2024. 

LOOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD

President Strand’s 65-year-old writings offer a perspective that might be useful to Oregon Staters viewing an uncertain future.

In the summer of 1958, Idaho President Donald Theophilus wrote the presidents of other Northwest schools urging continued scheduling ties among them; Strand responded in the affirmative, and then added:

“I’ll tell you what I think is going to happen. Some of the California institutions, particularly those in LA, will have their fling. Last night there was a UP [United Press] dispatch in the local paper. Its origin was Los Angeles. It gloated over the demise of the PCC. Now, it said, the large institutions with large stadiums can really make some money out of football …. Cal, Stanford and Washington can likewise fill their stadiums. How wonderful this will be ….”

Noting that potential discord among California schools might crack the new alignment, Strand concluded: “Nevertheless, this super-colossal virus will have to be attenuated and that will take time. After that, maybe, there’ll be hope for a new organization … Calm your fears, brother; just sit back and watch the show. It’s going to be good.”

WHEN ONE WOULDN’T LEAVE THE OTHER

While many of Oregon State President A.L. Strand’s remarks in the late 1950s seem relevant today, there’s at least one issue where his words no longer ring true — the Oregon schools’ commitment to stay together.

When talk heated up in 1957 about the four California schools and Washington leaving the PCC, Oregon State’s stature had risen, thanks to football Head Coach Tommy Prothro Jr., who guided the Beavers to the 1956 PCC title and a berth in the 1957 Rose Bowl. Word was that if the conference broke apart, Oregon State College — and not the University of Oregon — might be included in the new grouping.

Ted Carlson, ’50, then editor of the Oregon Stater, heard talk both inside OSC and from contacts at other institutions that the PCC might expel the University of Oregon in retribution for faculty athletic representative Orlando Hollis’ role in the conference cheating investigation.

Carlson wasn’t opposed to the idea of OSC making the leap alone and said as much in the Oregon Stater: “Our teams are solid and strong. Our teams are representative of the largest school in the state. Naturally we like to meet the best competition we can.” That resulted in the Oregon Journal publishing a story with a banner headline reading “OSC Alumni Paper Snubs UO.”

In response, President Strand told the Journal, “Any attempt to drive a wedge between Oregon State College and the University of Oregon would only hurt us both. I wish to make it clear that I repudiate most of the things in the article.”

The article earned Carlson a trip to Strand’s office. After a long career teaching journalism at OSU, he is now 96 and living in Lake Oswego. “He admonished me a little bit,” Carlson recollects. When the Pac-12 story broke this fall, he was struck by the differences between then and now. “Here President Strand was going to stick together, which he did. Old loyal Oregon State.”