Coaches mourn the death of Pac-12 women’s basketball in one final Vegas celebration

LAS VEGAS — This conference is special enough to Lindsay Gottlieb that she can still recall her first-ever game coaching in it at the drop of a hat, almost 20 years ago, back when Pac-12 was Pac-10 and the end was nowhere near.

She was a bright-eyed 27-year-old then, her first foray into the conference under coach Joanne Boyle at Cal. As Gottlieb told it, Boyle’s dad got sick one week and she had to go home, leaving Gottlieb in charge for a no-biggie game: Cal’s rivalry game at Stanford against legendary coach Tara VanDerveer. Cal guard Alexis Gray-Lawson scored “30-something,” Gottlieb remembered (indeed, she dropped 30). Cal lost.

Almost 20 years later, Gottlieb put her final stamp on the soon-to-be Pac-2, dissolved in a whirlwind of a few years of conference mismanagement and schools jumping ship for TV-deal money. Red-and-yellow confetti painted the hardwood at MGM Grand in Vegas after USC won the last-ever Pac-12 women’s basketball tournament, Gottlieb beaming ear-to-ear and posing for a picture with the championship trophy with young son Jordan, this beautiful life a college athletics conference had given her.

“It has meant everything to my professional career,” Gottlieb said, after USC’s 74-61 win over Stanford. “Quite honestly, it’s meant almost everything in my personal life. I met my husband while coaching at Cal. It’s all I’ve  known professionally for a New York kid.”

Make no mistake, though. Sunday — and the week-long tournament as a whole — brought an odd Vegas-infused sort of mourning, the trumpets of student bands blaring in the MGM Grand just a couple hundred feet from the cigarette smoke wafting from slot machines, the national anthem for USC-Stanford performed solely in double-neck electric guitar by a man wearing flame-themed face paint.

But this was, still, a funeral.

Pac-12 women’s basketball, as the world knows it, is dead. Gone. Going out with a true Vegas show, a scintillating tournament this past week that both stood as a testament to the unrivaled footing of the conference in the women’s game — and a disparaging reminder that it’ll never be the same again.

The eulogies came throughout the week, after win or after loss, a greater lament felt regardless of outcome.

“It’s a shame we’re at this point,” Oregon coach Kelly Graves said Wednesday.

“It’s just the most unfortunate thing,” Washington State’s Kamie Ethridge said Wednesday.

“I’m absolutely heartbroken about what has happened to our great conference,” VanDerveer said Friday, the all-time winningest coach in college basketball history and that great conference‘s lasting standard.

Even Gottlieb, now and forever the final champion of the Pac-12, expressed her dismay a few days ago.

“There’s so many good people working in the conference, so many good matchups, really good coaches in this league, of course, you kinda grieve for what’s lost,” Gottlieb said Tuesday. “And I do think, probably … USC and UCLA leaving didn’t necessarily have to end the conference, and it’s unfortunate that that’s the way that it went.”

Of course, Gottlieb also emphasized her excitement for what’s to come. For some, this final tournament represented an opportunity: stamp their place in the conference’s history before the changing winds of collegiate athletics blew them a different direction. USC, in particular, sits pretty after the buzzer rang on Sunday’s victory — they’ll head to the Big Ten, where increased nationwide visibility on the Big Ten Network is set to make freshman JuJu Watkins the next face of women’s basketball, as Iowa’s Caitlin Clark is set to hit the WNBA.

“It’s new for all of us, and it’s a new kind of platform for women’s basketball,” Gottlieb said of the move to the Big Ten, “and we want to be kind of, leaders in that area.”

But they were already leaders in the Pac-12, and the Pac-12 was already the leader in women’s basketball, despite fans’ seemingly ever-constant issues watching their teams on the Pac-12 Network. Six Pac-12 teams finished in the final regular-season AP Top 25 poll in 2023-24, more than any other conference. This particular season seemed as scintillating as any in recent memory, with consistent powerhouses like Stanford (28-4) and UCLA (25-6) duking it out with rising forces like USC (25-5) and Oregon State (24-7), seemingly every game winnable in a two-month gauntlet.

Multiple coaches called for at least seven teams from the Pac-12 to make the NCAA tournament; UCLA coach Cori Close and Gottlieb both advocated for Stanford, UCLA and USC to be named no. 1 seeds come March. And these weren’t exactly scalding-hot takes.

“I think that we play in the NCAA Tournament,” Washington coach Tina Langley said Wednesday, “every night in the Pac-12.”

Play. Played. Past tense. As Colorado senior Quay Miller put it: “I feel old, because it’s history.”

What a history it was. What a celebration it was, this past week, even in death.

Now the funeral-goers will scatter away, off to different ends of the country their simple geography suggests they don’t belong, dealt this hand by forces out of their control.