With the Pac-12 officially set to begin play next season, it’s time to open up the debate of where the conference’s new football championship game should be located: at a neutral site, or on the campus of the team with the best conference record. While there are strong arguments on both sides, the best thing for the conference to do would be to hold the game at a neutral, off-campus location.
To give a quick overview of the current status of discussions, Pac-10 officials are debating between several sites, as well as the on-campus option. Six cities are currently receiving serious consideration: Glendale, Ariz.; San Diego; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Las Vegas and Seattle. The frontrunners are San Francisco and Seattle–Los Angeles is a weak choice because the winner of the game would be going right back to the Rose Bowl in January, Glendale is already the site of a BCS bowl, San Diego started out as a dark horse candidate and Las Vegas (while nearly ideal) doesn’t have an appropriate venue.
So why should the new Pac-12 choose to stage its championship game at one of these sites anyway? The arguments for staying on campus are pretty strong–namely, it would give teams further incentive to play for a better final record and make it easier to fans to attend games.
However, this scheme could backfire in any number of ways. Let’s be fully honest–the reason the Pac-12 wants a championship game is because the game would generate a fair amount of money for the conference through ticket sales and (mainly) media contracts with big networks. Putting the game in a home stadium would work quite nicely if, say, USC won the conference–the Trojans would certainly fill their 90,000-seat stadium, and they have an ideal location to attract a whole mess of media attention.
Should the game end up in some godforsaken location like Pullman, Wash. or Corvallis, Ore., this equation would be totally reversed. Yes, the stadiums would most likely be sold out, since fans of the home school would undoubtedly buy up every seat. However, the conference wouldn’t attain anywhere near the media exposure it is looking for, and the game would be easily overshadowed by the big-ticket SEC and Big Ten championship games (held in Atlanta and Indianapolis, respectively).
Competitively, there are also issues with deciding which division champion would get the game. Though the Pac-10 currently plays a round-robin schedule, with each team playing every other team once a season in football, the addition of Colorado and Utah will necessitate splitting the conference up into divisions. The Pac-12 is expected to continue its nine-game conference schedule, with each team playing five games against the rest of its division and four games against teams from the other division. Naturally, the strength of conference schedule will vary, but if one division is significantly weaker than another, it could make the choice of host campus unfair.
More broadly, this debate is about the Pac-12 measuring up to the other conferences with which it aspires to compete. Today, the Pac-10 does not receive as much media attention and respect as some of its rival conferences–indeed, this was part of the reason that the conference chose to aggressively pursue expansion opportunities in the past few months. Putting its new championship game at a bona fide NFL venue is an important step toward gaining the same kind of prestige as the Big Ten and the SEC. Putting it anywhere else would broadcast this message: “We’re not quite good enough to fill a big stadium with fans, so we’re going to throw some bullshit justifications around and put the game somewhere it would definitely be filled.”
The Pac-10 has aspirations of becoming an elite conference, especially in football. In order to do that, it needs a championship game in a major city that will attract the attention of the nation in a way that a middle-of-nowhere college campus just can’t. The conference wants to play with the big boys, but if it goes through with putting its marquee event on campus, it’ll have to stay at the kids’ table.