Washington has already claimed a share of the Pac-12 title as the rest of the conference toils in mediocrity. Who are the favorites in this even conference?
Pac-12 basketball has been an absolute mess all season long. Outside of Washington, every team has underachieved, putting them in position to be a one-bid league.
However, these struggles have made the conference one of the most balanced in the country in between the Huskies at the top and Cal at the bottom. Nine teams have between five and eight losses in conference play and the team in 11th place (Washington State) has four wins with two coming over two of the conference’s better teams in Arizona and Arizona State.
The parity with these teams, albeit the parity of mediocre teams rather than good teams, has made every game unpredictable.
This weekend, we had Oregon State beat USC and UCLA beat Oregon after the Trojans trounced Oregon earlier this week. So the Beavers are the best of the four? Well, they lost to UCLA this week, which came after the Bruins had lost four of their previous five games.
Do you want to try to figure out this conference? You could realistically argue for any order as long as Washington is at the top and Cal is at the bottom. Everybody in the middle has beaten everyone else in the middle, or at the very least has beaten multiple teams that have beaten the one team they haven’t beat.
Got all that? Let’s try to make sense of the conference in this week’s Pac-12 Power Rankings.