Pac-12 Basketball: What would a conference challenge look like?

The Pac-12 is the only major conference that doesn’t have a “challenge.”  In this piece, we hypothetically place teams that will face off for western supremacy.

Most of the major conferences have “challenges” against each other in the non-conference portion of their schedule, Big Ten vs. ACC and Big 12 vs. SEC.

Even the newly formed Big East and Atlantic 10 have created challenges to bump up their strength of schedules. The one big exception would be the Pac-12. One solution would be to take the best from multiple conferences and line them up against the Pac-12.

Here’s how it would work: the Pac-12 would bring all of their teams to Las Vegas for 12 neutral site games. The matchups would be selected by television officials in a neutral matter and they would select the best teams from the following west coast based conferences:

West Coast Conference

Mountain West Conference

Western Athletic Conference

Big West Conference

Big Sky Conference

This would give the best chance for a competitive challenge by taking the best of each conference. The regular season champion would get an automatic bid in the event, providing an extra incentive. Vegas would be the perfect neutral site for the challenge because all of the conference tournaments, except for the Big West, are located there.

Since ESPN has media deals with each conference the games can be split between the Pac-12 network (which has been struggling as of late) for the smaller games and ESPN and ESPN2 for the headliners later that night.

For a hypothetical scenario let’s see how the day of games would play out.