Pac-12 has been a big letdown

Selection Sunday rolled around a week ago and based on the draw, I would imagine that Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott was in a room somewhere jumping for joy and dishing out high-fives to his colleagues.

A record seven teams were tapped by the selection committee to join the 68-field team that made up the 2016 NCAA Tournament, headlined by the No. 1-seeded Oregon Ducks, who won both the Pac-12 regular season title and the conference tournament.

With the Pac-12 sending seven teams to the “Big Dance,” it sat atop the list with the other powerhouse conferences in the ACC, Big Ten and Big 12 for most schools in the tourney. Finally, it was believed that the “Conference of Champions,” as UCLA legend Bill Walton always says, was getting national recognition, despite the majority of its games being played past most people’s bed times on the other side of the country. It was the icing on the cake to one of the Pac-12’s most exciting conference tournaments in its history.

It’s all been downhill from there, though, as the selection committee did their part, but Pac-12 teams did not live up to their end of the bargain. Of the seven teams that earned bids, the only one that remains standing is top-seeded Oregon, which has a date with defending national champion Duke as the Sweet 16 tips off in Anaheim on Thursday.

It’s a marquee matchup that may very well define whether Oregon, and the Pac-12 by osmosis, was worthy of its No. 1 seed in the first place — most of the critics said otherwise, despite 28 combined regular season and conference tournament wins.

I had the pleasure of seeing Dana Altman’s team play on multiple occasions this past season and they have the size, length and depth to play into April (spoiler alert, I picked them to make the Final Four).

The jury may still be out on the Ducks, who have won 10 consecutive games, but it’s the other six teams who really let down the conference.

The league was on the wrong side of history, becoming the first league to lose five games as higher seeds in the Round of 64 since seeding began in 1979.

Aside from Oregon, the No. 3-seeded Utes were the only team to make it out of the first round, but only before being pummeled by No. 11-seeded Gonzaga in the Round of 32.

As most of us know, USC lost on a last-second layup in a game that it was in the driver’s seat for.

Cal, which was awarded its highest seed ever at No. 4, was upset by Hawaii. Oregon State and Colorado were knocked off by two formidable opponents, respectively, in VCU and UConn and Arizona, a team that was ranked as high as No. 7 in the AP Top 25, couldn’t keep up with a hot Wichita State team.

The selection committee gave Pac-12 teams the shot they earned and deserved for their performance in the regular season, but it seems like the opportunity given to them was taken for granted.

By getting knocked early in the tourney — most of them in games they were favored to win — they only confirmed the stereotype that West Coast teams, for the most part, can’t compete with the beasts of the East and the Midwest when it comes to March Madness.

Historically, the Pac-12 is, indeed, the “Conference of Champions,” boasting the most national titles of any other conference; the disclaimer being that a large majority of the conference’s 15 titles were derived from UCLA during the legendary John Wooden era.

It has been a while, however, since a team from the “Conference of Champions” came out on top. A Pac-12 team has yet to win it all in the 21st century and hasn’t since Lute Olson’s Arizona Wildcats in 1997.

Unless Oregon can pull it off, it looks like that drought will continue for at least another year.

In 2016, the conference was as deep as it has been in recent memory, very similar to how it was during the football season.

Despite its fair amount of growth over the past few years, unless Pac-12 teams can perform in the postseason and advance to the sport’s grandest stage, when the masses tune in to watch the best play, it is only going to continue to be discounted as the league that just can’t get over the hump. The events that took place in the first round of March Madness were just a microcosm of that.

Darian Nourian is a senior majoring in print and digital journalism. His column, “Persian Persuasion,” runs Thursdays.