ESPN Men's Basketball

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Quick thoughts on 11th-seeded Colorado's 68-64 victory over No. 6 seed UNLV:

Overview: Colorado carried the momentum of its four-game run to the Pac-12 tournament title into a convincing second-round NCAA win over UNLV at the Pit. This wasn’t close. Colorado looked like it was the champ of a major league from the opening tip against a team that ended up behind New Mexico and San Diego State in the Mountain West. The confidence with which the Buffaloes played, from making 3s to contesting shots to rebounding, was unmatched at times by the Runnin’ Rebels. This scrappy bunch of Buffs was playing with house money. Colorado coach Tad Boyle said Wednesday that the pressure was all off the Buffs. He was right. They played as loose as any of the eight teams in the field here at the Pit. But they are still the Buffaloes and couldn’t close. UNLV made quite a run to get it within one possession, but then Colorado showed poise, created turnovers and converted free throws.

Turning point: UNLV had cut the deficit to three, and the Runnin’ Rebels were on the verge of making it a one-point game. But a quick turn of events occurred when Andre Roberson blocked a shot and it led to a runout for Carlon Brown, who flushed home a jam. That gave the Buffs a 60-55 lead and a chance to breath. The Runnin’ Rebels would cut the lead to three one more time at 67-64 with 8 seconds left on a rainbow 3-pointer by Chace Stanback.

Key player: There were a lot of choices here, but a pair of back-to-back 3s by Austin Dufault early in the second half were decisive. They helped send a strong message that the Buffs weren’t going to back down. Dufault ended up with 14 points. He was an efficient 3-of-4 on 3s. But his bang-bang triples were crucial to creating some distance between the two teams after the break.

Key stat: Rebounding. The Runnin’ Rebels went into the game as the more aggressive rebounding team. It shouldn’t have been close. And it wasn’t. The Buffaloes dominated the backboard. Colorado outrebounded UNLV 43-30. UNLV couldn't get second shots on a consistent enough basis to take the lead.

Miscellaneous: Colorado gets major props for its fan contingent. The Buffs brought their A-game. I remember going to a few CU games in Boulder in the '90s, and it was never this loud. The enthusiasm for this team has certainly resonated. ... NCAA president Mark Emmert didn’t last the whole second game. I’m sure he was off to another site for Friday. ... Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott was behind the Colorado bench and so was interim Big 12 commissioner Chuck Neinas. Neinas lives in Colorado, and the Buffs used to be in the Big 12/Big Eight. ... The Buffs had the karma going the moment they stepped on the Pit floor. Assistant coach Tom Abatemarco was an assistant on the 1983 NC State team that won the epic title game in this building.

What’s next: Colorado will play Baylor on Saturday in what would appear to be a mismatch. The Buffs don’t have the interior length to match the third-seeded Bears. But why would anyone doubt the Buffs' ability to make this a game and pull off the upset? This will easily be the toughest game for the Buffs since this run started.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Vanderbilt finally solved its Kentucky problem by winning the SEC tournament on Sunday in New Orleans.

But that did nothing to answer its larger issue: winning in the NCAA tournament.

Double-digit seeds had flummoxed the Commodores in three of the past four NCAA tournaments with losses to Siena, Murray State and Richmond.

Harvard was a sentimental favorite in making its first NCAA tournament since 1946. Oh, and the Crimson were seeded No. 12, making this one of those dreaded 5-12 games.

“It’s well publicized that Vandy’s lost in the first round the last three out of four years,’’ said Harvard senior guard Oliver McNally. “So we knew if we were hanging around, we’d put that thought in their head and see what happened. And I thought we were going to do that.’’

Vandy had an 18-point lead on Harvard on Thursday afternoon at the Pit. And then suddenly it was five.

“Credit to them for coming out really strong after that and being strong with the ball and making free throws,’’ McNally said. “But we made a great run.’’

The Commodores held on to win 79-70 and looked every bit the part of a team that could beat No. 4 Wisconsin on Saturday in a third-round game for the right to possibly take on East top seed Syracuse (if the Orange can knock off Kansas State in Pittsburgh on Saturday).

John Jenkins was sensational with 27 points. The Dores got plenty of pop from Brad Tinsley, Jeffery Taylor and 11 boards from Festus Ezeli. Vanderbilt’s big four came through when it mattered most.

Vandy can exhale -- for now.

“I didn’t want to be in that tight of a situation with the way we had the game going in our favor,’’ said Vandy coach Kevin Stallings. “But since we won, I’m glad it unfolded that way.’’

Stallings knew the toughness question was relevant with this squad during the SEC tournament. The Dores simply didn’t have the track record to back up their belief that they were over their late-game issues.

And comments like Taylor’s that the big lead led to a bit of relaxation and too much standing on offense just contributed to the narrative. But there was something the Dores had that had been missing even in last-second losses in previous NCAAs to Siena and Murray State: composure.

Jenkins used a different word -- poised. “I think leadership is definitely a factor in that guys huddled up and decided we need to lock down and get rebounds down the stretch,” he said. “We did what we had to do. We hit big free throws.’’

The Dores had one possession that took the lead from 11 to 14 with a four-shot sequence that ended up in a traditional 3-point play for Jenkins. That lead ballooned to 18. Harvard made its run, but the hole was too deep.

“I think our maturity showed up a little bit there,’’ Tinsley said. “We were playing not to lose instead of playing to win. You can never do that, especially in the NCAA tournament.’’

Vanderbilt could finally talk about its albatross after the win.

“It really means a lot for the seniors to be our last time in the NCAA tournament,’’ Tinsley said. “We just kind of got that monkey off our back and win a close game in the first round. It just means a lot to us old guys, the coaching staff and the program.’’

Getting into the NCAA tournament did that as well for Harvard. The Crimson didn’t just show up for the first time in 66 years. They got off to a rocky start and scrapped their way back.

Harvard senior Keith Wright said that getting into the NCAA tournament and representing the Ivy League, especially after losing the playoff to Princeton at the buzzer last season, was a celebration of all the hard work put forth.

“It’s just really special and I’m really glad to be a part of it,’’ said McNally. “They sell you on all kinds of dreams but Coach (Tommy) Amaker had a plan and this plan was followed through. Not only were there good players but really good people. We made the tournament. We wanted to advance. That was obviously the ultimate goal.’’

But this meant more to the Ivy League and to Harvard to have its flagship name finally make the dance.

Alumni from the White House to an 86-year-old surviving member of the 1946 team — the Crimson's previous NCAA entry — could all feel good about this run. The latter was Don Swegan, who was at the Pit in his old Harvard sweater. He was in his glory, talking to other alumni. The Friends of Harvard hoops read about Swegan on ESPN.com and wanted to make sure he made it to Albuquerque from near Youngstown, Ohio, so they paid for his expenses. NCAA president Mark Emmert and Harvard alumnus and Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott wanted to have their picture taken with Swegan.

These were good memories for him, the Harvard program and a clear signal that the Crimson aren’t going into NCAA tournament hibernation.

“For us to represent our school and conference for the first time in so many years and to have so many folks come and cheer us on means so much to us,’’ Amaker said. “This has been and is a big deal.’’

In March, the Pac-12 will hold its conference tournament for what could be the final time at Los Angeles' Staples Center, where empty seats have become the norm while commissioner Larry Scott is rethinking the event model going forward.

Could the next site of the tournament be the MGM Grand in Las Vegas? That's a definite possibility, Bloomberg Businessweek reports after a conversation with Scott.

"An empty stadium looks awful on TV," he says. He has faced that problem with the conference's postseason basketball tournament, which has been played at the Staples Center in Los Angeles to less than packed houses; the conference is strongly considering moving the tournament to the MGM Grand (MGM) in Las Vegas. "People will travel to Las Vegas," Scott says.

Las Vegas is the current site of conference tournaments for the Mountain West, WAC and WCC. Adding the Pac-12 event to Sin City could help create a college baskeball fan's playground there in the weeks before the start of the NCAA tournament. For the Pac-12, it's a central location that, as Scott mentioned, could be more of a popular travel destination.

Salt Lake City and Seattle are the other cities that have publicly revealed their bids for the Pac-12 tournament, and Scott could very well look to big arenas rather than holding the event at rotating campus sites.

"I really want a strong collegiate atmosphere around the basketball tournament," Scott told ESPN.com in August. "I don't want it to feel overly corporate. I want it to be well-attended and well-supported and there to be great buzz around the event."

Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott talks about the conference's decision to stick with 12 teams.

Last month as Texas A&M was on the verge of bolting from the Big 12, I asked Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott given his previous prediction of an eventual world with super conferences how he thought that might affect college basketball.

Scott declined comment.

But Colorado coach Tad Boyle, whose program had left the Big 12 for the Pac-12 and stood to benefit greatly from the new arrangement, had misgivings at the time about hypothetical super conferences and how they would affect college basketball.

"What makes our sport so great is not just the BCS-type schools," Boyle said then. "It's the 300-plus D-I programs, and everyone feels they've got a shot at making the NCAA tournament. That's what makes our sport unique, what makes March Madness appealing. If you just went with a super power conference structure, I just don't think it's good for our sport."

Boyle, who not long ago coached at Northern Colorado out of the Big Sky, touched on how parity is one of college basketball's signature traits. It's the time-honored tradition that on any given night, five students in sneakers can beat another group of kids no matter the disadvantages in rankings, resources and pedigree.

The formation of super conferences could strike a blow if you believe in such things, with television contracts and pooled revenues making the gaps between the power conferences and the mid-majors even wider.

So when the Pac-12 last night announced that it had decided not to expand for the time being, it was a victory for status-quo seekers. Expansion might still be inevitable in some parts of the country, but for one night, the headline was stability.

It was something echoed in a statement from UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero, who happens to be a former NCAA Division I men's basketball committee chair.

"After weighing all of the factors regarding potential expansion, our presidents and chancellors have decided to maintain the status quo and ensure that our conference remains a 12-school league. At UCLA, we feel this is the correct decision for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which are the stability of a 12-team conference format, the overall welfare of our student-athletes and the ability to maintain the traditional rivalries that have existed from our conference’s inception."

As I tweeted last night, I like to envision the Pac-12's decision not to expand to 16 teams a certain way. I like to think the Pac-12's various university presidents and league officials met each other in a conference room. I like to think the discussion went around the room -- think "12 Angry Men," but with shirts that look like this -- until one of the participants raised his arms and quieted the crowd out of respect.

"Can someone," this imaginary person in this imaginary scenario says, "please give me one good reason why we need to expand?"

The imaginary room falls silent. The members glance longingly around the room. No one has the answer.

Of course, the actual reasons the Pac-12 made its surprise decision against expansion are far less dramatic. A source told ESPN's Andy Katz that the Pac-12 eschewed the moves "because commissioner Larry Scott failed to get assurance that Texas would back an equal revenue sharing plan if the league added the Longhorns, Oklahoma, Texas Tech and Oklahoma State." In its statement on the decision Tuesday, Scott cited the Pac-12's "culture of equality" as one of its reasons for passing on expansion. Why add four more teams, and split that massive new TV rights deal four more ways, if good ol' Texas wasn't willing to do the same with its own individual network revenue? If USC and UCLA reluctantly agreed to revenue sharing last year, why shouldn't the rest of the new-look conference follow suit?

So maybe my pretend scenario isn't that far off the truth. Maybe the Pac-12 realized how good things already were. The league doesn't need to add teams to make more money. Just this summer, the conference signed a 12-year, $3 billion TV deal with Fox and ESPN. When you've got that in your back pocket, why rock the boat? Why do you need to add four more teams?

The fallout from the Pac-12's decision could be widespread. For one, it puts a halt -- however brief it may be -- to the rampant game of musical chairs that is conference realignment. It could save the Big 12, at least for a few more years. It keeps Missouri from having to sweat that big SEC invite. The Big East is still at risk, as the conference's potential merger with the remaining Big 12 teams may have been its best move after the Syracuse and Pittsburgh defections. But the league's football schools have made a pledge to stick together and seek to add new programs, and though the league's hoops stable was weakened by the losses Sunday, it is still perfectly viable where basketball is concerned.

In general, the Pac-12's move helped restore some sanity to college sports. Can everyone take a breather on conference realignment now? I -- and pretty much everyone else in the world, as far as I can tell -- sure hope so.

More than anything, though, the Pac-12's decision helps us solidify what the Pac-12 will look like in the years to come, particularly from a basketball perspective. We know Arizona is on the rise. We know UCLA is right on the Wildcats' tails. We know the league will be weak in terms of depth for the next few seasons, and we know that the conference's recent additions, Colorado and Utah, won't push the league toward basketball dominance anytime soon.

But we also know that those 12 teams stand to gain every bit as much from not expanding as from making the move. As state above, the current Pac-12 configuration has a massive TV rights deal in its back pocket. It will showcase its teams on two major networks more frequently than at any time in its past. Its national exposure will increase by leaps and bounds. And that can only help each of those struggling teams -- and the Pac-12 has more than a few these days despite all the rebuilding the conference has seen in recent seasons -- get back to hoops prominence more quickly.

We could understand why the Pac-12 wanted to expand. Hey, if you've got a chance to add Texas to your conference, it probably makes sense to try. But at the end of the day, expansion didn't help the Pac-12, particularly in basketball. For once, someone saw the benefits of the status quo. For once, common sense prevailed over panic and fear.

If only every conference realignment could proceed so rationally. Wait, why do we need to do this again? Maybe that question was never asked. Maybe it seemed silly. But whatever produced the Pac-12's decision, every college sports fan has reason to be thankful.

I'm not sure whether this is encouraging or not. At the very least, it's good to know that the NCAA isn't planning on merely sitting around in Indianapolis and letting Texas A&M's move to the SEC spring another six months of conference realignment madness. Sure, that may happen. But at the very least, NCAA president Mark Emmert seems to want a role in the discussion. Even more encouraging is the news that some conference commissioners want Emmert to want a role in the discussion.

From the New York Times's Pete Thamel:

Mark Emmert, the president of the N.C.A.A., reached out to several top college officials Monday, suggesting a meeting to discuss a less cannibalistic and more collegial way to approach conference expansion.

“I think people have asked him to make some phone calls,” Pacific-12 Commissioner Larry Scott said. “He’s doing exactly what he should be doing.” [...] “Those conversations start and stop with that there’s no N.C.A.A. authority on these topics,” Scott said.

Emmert has the support of Scott, ACC commissioner John Swofford, Big East commissioner John Marinatto, and Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe, the latter of whom shared a heated phone call with SEC commissioner Mike Slive about A&M's potential move last week, according to the Times. In other words, these commissioners are seeing what's happening and getting visions of Armageddon; there's a lot of "Desolation Row" on these guys' iPods. Rather than stand by and watch the SEC tear the Big 12 apart -- and then react by scraping and clawing for the leftovers -- they'd like Emmert to step in and try to prevent that from happening.

Emmert is in a difficult position. He can try to influence the realignment debate and use his clout, as it were, to bring those rapacious capitalists in the conference commissioner seats to a mutually beneficial conversation. What he can't do, as far as we know, is anything to actually stop realignment from happening. He might be able to organize the process. He could raise the level of decorum involved in the debate. But realignment is really the conferences' business, and if massive changes are going to come -- if Texas A&M really wants to SECede (see what they did there?) -- it's not clear Emmert can do anything to stop them.

Today was a big day for the Pac-12 with the official additions of Colorado and Utah to the conference. It was the culmination of a lot of work put in by commissioner Larry Scott to change the face of the league. Everything from its membership and television deal to its logo and website is now different.

The next step? Figuring out what to do about the Pac-12 tournament, which has lacked buzz in recent years while being held at Staples Center in Los Angeles. Scott told the San Jose Mercury News that eight to 10 cities have expressed interest in bidding to host the 2013 tournament and that he isn't committed to any model at this time.

That could mean the end of the tournament in Los Angeles, the use of rotating sites or even a neutral city like Las Vegas, which currently hosts three conference tournaments for the Mountain West Conference, WAC and WCC.

A new city that's emerging as a viable possibility is Seattle, and according to the Seattle Times, the city will submit a proposal to host the Pac-12 tournament at KeyArena.

"We're excited about the opportunity to bring a tournament that could have a great impact not only just for the Seattle Center and KeyArena, but also the surrounding community," Marc Avery Jones, Director of Marketing and Business Development at the Seattle Center.

KeyArena is the home of the Seattle University men's basketball team and Gonzaga's annual Battle in Seattle.

KeyArena offers an attractive NBA-level arena like Staples and also a local fan base that wants to watch top-level basketball in the city. It's a desirable destination. When it was announced that Seattle University would join the WAC in 2012-13, commissioner Karl Benson immediately made it known he would consider KeyArena as a potential site for the WAC tournament as well.

So maybe Seattle after losing its NBA team can soon offer some basketball action aside from the Washington Huskies, who would love the tournament to move there. The conference tournament possibilities are still in the formulation stage, but they are ideas worthy of serious consideration.

The Washington Huskies reached the Sweet 16 last year, and the media declared them the favorites heading into this season. Lorenzo Romar and Isaiah Thomas, prepared to prove everyone right, marched into Los Angeles on Dec. 29 for the Pac-10 opener and walked right into an ambush at the Galen Center. USC led by 12 points early, got a 28-point, 14-rebound performance out of Nikola Vucevic and ultimately took Washington to overtime. The Huskies, amidst foul trouble and frustration, still prevailed.

It was a great game featuring storylines and future NBA draft picks, and yet the game wasn't televised.

Assume Fox viewing positions? Um, no. I had to follow the game blow-by-blow over my personal Twitter feed.

Dec. 29 certainly wasn't the date when Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott threw up his hands and realized the conference needed change with its new television deal for 2012. For the fans, not being able to watch the opener on TV was simply outrageous.

But while Washington's win against USC wasn't the first Pac-10 basketball game not to be televised, it could very well be one of the last after Scott announced on Wednesday a 12-year television contract with ESPN and Fox that begins in the 2012-13 season.

A clear winner in all this is college basketball because the new deal gives the Pac-12 not only more exposure, but also the necessary number of platforms to broadcast all the games.

ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU and Fox Sports Net will have the rights to broadcast 68 regular-season games every year. The ESPN channels will air 46 of those games on Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday or Sunday nights, including in new 8 p.m. PT windows.

The Pac-12 is also creating its own network, and the balance of the regular-season games -- more than 120 of them -- will be televised there. If a conference game is being played, count on it being televised because Scott created his own space to do so. (Scott said the channel will likely be subscription based.)

ESPN receives the rights to the Pac-12 tournament title game every other year beginning in 2012-13 along with one Pac-12 tournament quarterfinal and semifinal game. (TV executives indicated Wednesday they preferred to keep the tournament in Los Angeles.)

Additionally, Scott had academics to please and did so. The Pac-10 currently plays on Thursdays and Saturdays with the occasional Sunday. Adding Wednesday dates creates more exposure opportunities, but Scott said he did not have plans to play on other nights.

"We didn't have to move off of our scheduling model very much," he said. "It's not going to create more missed class time for student-athletes."

So it's a win-win for college basketball. The entities involved got what they wanted, and more importantly, the beneficiary is the fan who wants to watch the Pac-12.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Change can be scary, especially in the tradition-steeped Pac-10.

Consider that when the conference’s athletic directors met this month, USC’s Pat Haden reportedly told the group, “my alumni will kill me if we don’t play the Northern California schools.”

That issue, among others, was smoothed over and solved today. The Pac-10’s CEOs unanimously approved a North-South divisional alignment for football that splits up the Bay Area and Los Angeles schools, but also guarantees that the California teams will play every year.

No, schools from the Pacific Northwest won’t annually get to play in Los Angeles, where they seem to grow football players on palm trees. But the conference’s new championship game will be played at the home stadium of the team with the best overall conference record, meaning that L.A. might be a December destination anyway.

“I talked to one Oregon coach that said, ‘No problem. We plan on making the championship game every year,’ ” commissioner Larry Scott said.

In the end, the decisions ratified by the CEOs were a blend of the old with the new. Rivalries dating back to the 1930s were preserved despite a divisional split necessitated by expansion and the creation of a title game.

“The conference had been outstanding as a traditional conference,” said Arizona State president Michael Crow, who chairs the Pac-10’s CEO council. “Now we want to go beyond tradition. Not throw tradition out the door, but now how can you leverage tradition by advancing the conference in the new kinds of designs, new kinds of arrangements, new kinds of networks and contracts and so forth.

“Larry brings that skill set to the table, which is why we went out and found Larry and hired him.”

Scott praised the collegial way in which the presidents and chancellors participated in the give-and-take, and their schools are literally richer for it. The conference is now touting its more equal revenue-sharing plan, and new money could still be had if the league moves to create a television network.

Crow envisions that such a network would help spread the gospel of the Pac-10 academics by projecting, as he called it, “American success through championship behavior.”

“How do you tie national competitiveness and national athletic performance to academic performance and innovation?” he added.

The creation of a title game is just one more way the conference can show off its ability to make varsity as well as straight A’s.

“It promises to deliver a full house and have the energy, excitement and atmosphere befitting a major collegiate championship,” Scott said.

“If you would have told me a year ago when I met with you coming out of our CEO meeting that this conference would have expanded by two, started a football championship game and had this level of optimism, I would have been thrilled,” Scott added. “I feel like we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress in a short period of time. We have a lot of momentum right now. I couldn’t be more pleased. I feel energized by where we’re going.”

The Pac-10 is to decide this month how scheduling will work next season when the conference adds Colorado and Utah, but looking deeper into the future, what's a Pac-12 conference tournament going to look like?

The tournament has been held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles since 2002, and as commissioner Larry Scott told reporters at Oregon State on Saturday, the event site is something the league will evaluate.

"We're committed to be there for the next two tournaments -- 2011 and 2012. I suspect it'll be after next year's tournament where we're going to try some new things. We're going to try to inject some new excitement and marketing around that event. We're really trying to elevate it from where it's at.

"And that'll be about the time we're negotiating our TV deals, and currently the right to decide the location of the basketball championship is with one of our media partners -- FOX. It was licensed to them as part of that TV deal. The first decision we'll take next spring is will we continue to license to one of our media partners the right to place our basketball championship somewhere? Or is that something we're going to take back and control ourselves?"

Scott has been praised by administrators and coaches for his outside-the-box thinking, and it should be interesting how talk of a potential move out of Los Angeles will be received.

Whatever is decided -- going to a neutral host city, rotating sites or keeping the event right where it is -- there is bound to be debate considering how difficult it was for the tournament to gain approval in the first place.

In 2000 when the schools voted for it, the Pac-10 and the Ivy League were the only Division I conferences at the time not to have a tournament. Cal coach Mike Montgomery, then at Stanford, and Arizona's Lute Olson cited class time as one of the reasons for not holding the event.

Though the conference already had a true round-robin schedule in place to decide a regular-season champion, the television money to stage the tournament was too good to pass up.

The Pac-10 has come a long way since then with Scott as commissioner trying to reinvigorate the league's image, and it's again negotiations for a television deal that will give him the leverage to make changes.

What does that mean for the tournament's future? Stay tuned.

Think Washington is the Pac-10 team the conference wants to showcase this coming season?

The Huskies will stray from the Pac-10's usual Thursday-Saturday schedule to play three times on Sunday nights, starting with a Jan. 16 road game against defending regular-season conference champion Cal and then twice against rival Washington State on Jan. 30 and Feb. 27.

Two of those games were moved from Saturdays, according to the Seattle Times.

"You play those nights as opposed to Saturday and you can get more eyeballs on you," coach Lorenzo Romar said. "On Saturday, there's 1,000 games and obviously there's less on Sundays."

For years the conference coaches were reluctant to shift from the Thursday-Saturday format, but the scheduling changes are in line with Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott's plan to increase visibility for the conference.

Cal, which won its first regular-season title in 50 years this past season, will also get three Sunday dates. Besides the Washington matchup, the Bears will play rival Stanford on Jan. 2 and against UCLA on Feb. 20.

Other Sunday games include UCLA-USC on Jan. 9 and Arizona-Arizona State on Feb. 13.

So mark your calendars because this isn't your father's Pac-10 or even the 2010 Pac-10, which featured only four Sunday dates for basketball.

Pac-10 pride didn't exactly abound this season given the loss of NBA talent coming into the year, lack of quality non-conference wins, disappearance from the national rankings, and struggles in sending two teams to the NCAA tournament.

But players this coming season will be wearing Pac-10 pride on their jerseys in the form of the conference's new logo, commissioner Larry Scott told the Arizona Daily Star.

"You will see it on every football field this year and on every uniform in the Pac-10 this year in every sport," Scott said.

Oh, and don't forget basketball courts, too.

According to SI.com, the New York-based firm SME that Scott hired to look into the Pac-10's brand identity reported back to him that the conference lost out on value by not putting its logo on uniforms, fields and equipment.

Some of the findings probably sent palms crashing into foreheads in the Pac-10's Walnut Creek, Calif., office. Other leagues had required teams to wear conference patches on their uniforms and paint logos on their playing surfaces for more than a decade. How could the Pac-10 miss something so obvious? "Isn't that amazing? It's just so simple," [SME chairman Ed] O'Hara said. "But it's a loss of revenue of exposure."

That's why these days, the Pac-10 logo is seemingly everywhere -- like at a cocktail party in New York. The Los Angeles Daily News reported that at football media day in Pasadena, there was a 15-foot-high inflatable version of the thing.

And when the Pac-10 needed to make corrections on the questionable picture choices it made on the basketball page of it's new website? Well, it replaced those pictures with alternate images of the Pac-10 logo.

Conference realignment changed our world! OK, not really. It tweaked things here and there -- a couple of teams left the Big 12, a couple of teams went to the Pac-10, a couple of teams went to the Big Ten -- but it didn't fundamentally alter the landscape of college basketball in the way we once feared it would.

What conference realignment did do is make things incredibly irritating for people who like numerical organization. The Pac-10 now has 12 teams. The Big Ten now has 12 teams. The Big 12 now has 10 teams. Sure, each conference's name has more to do with brand than accuracy -- the Big Ten has been rolling with its deceptive moniker since Penn State joined the conference in 1993 -- but still, that's confusing stuff.

Since this order was finalized, most assumed the conferences would stick with their names. Then, this week, the Pac-10 announced it would be changing its name to the Pac-12. That announcement was highlighted by commissioner Larry Scott's declaration that the conference will be "mathematically correct going forward."

The question now is, will other conferences do the same? ESPN's Big 12 blogger David Ubben sat in on Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe's press conference Wednesday. Beebe's answer: maybe.

"I'm going to spend the next eight to nine months, prior to our next year when we have 10 members, fully exploring what we want to do in that regard," he said.

"I've heard of conferences that have not had the exact numbers they have in their names actually be representing their membership," Beebe deadpanned in the direction of the Big Ten [...] "I think we need to look at not just whether we change our name or our brand, but what are the messages we want to convey going forward? We'll engage in a process to do that and hopefully in the spring, early summer next year, we'll have a better idea of what we want to do going forward."

David thinks the conference will ultimately end up sticking with the name, which is a fair prediction. After all, despite Beebe's joke of a swap between him and Big Ten commissioner Jim Delaney, it's not as if the Big 12 can just change its name to the Big Ten. That would be even more confusing than the current situation. And somehow, "10 Teams From The Lower Midwest, The South, And The Great Plains States," doesn't quite roll off the tongue.

Still, it's interesting to contemplate. In the end, maybe a batch of new conference names will be the lasting legacy of the realignment-dominated summer of 2010. I could live with that.

Logging on to the Pac-10's relaunched website, the first thing you notice is commissioner Larry Scott smiling right back at you as if this the beginning of a new day for the expansion-minded conference.

But is football such a driving force that the Pac-10 couldn't have bothered to take a second look and worked out the kinks on their men's basketball page? Because some of the picture choices are downright questionable.

A press release on USC appealing NCAA sanctions unfortunately comes along with a picture of John Wooden sitting with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar inside UCLA's Pauley Pavilion. Wooden is also mistakenly pictured in an update on Washington's Abdul Gaddy playing for Team USA's U19 team this summer.

No offense to UCLA, but a basketball year in review piece that's paired with a picture of backup guard Mustafa Abdul-Hamid playing for a 14-18 Bruins team seems like a missed opportunity to promote regular season champion Cal or Washington's Sweet 16 team.

The conference does want to promote its current players, right? In a press release on Stanford's Landry Fields being taken in the second round of the NBA draft, we get a picture of former Stanford star Mark Madsen. Another press release on Gaddy doesn't picture Gaddy himself, but some other kids enjoying a basketball camp.

In recent days, the website was inaccessible as the conference put up a countdown clock on its homepage to announce the relaunch and build up anticipation.

Now it just looks like the Pac-10 could have used that time to fix up more than just its own image.