Bud Withers

SEATTLE -- More than a year ago, when the Pac-12 Conference was entertaining all sorts of tortured proposals about how to align divisions, there was an operative mantra of sorts:

Not everybody's going to be completely happy.

That remains the de facto marketing slogan, one that works famously with the news that in the next few years, a handful of rivalry games are going to be uprooted from traditional dates and moved closer to Halloween. A Stanford-California game is shortly to be staged in October.

SEATTLE -- Back on the first Pac-12 Conference football media day in late July, USC coach Lane Kiffin was asked about the new college rule that would take points off the board if a showboating player acts out on the way to the end zone.

Sighed Kiffin, "I'm sure somebody around the country will give us a lesson to learn from."

SEATTLE -- Hey there, Utah and Colorado, welcome to our world. We get why you're so excited to come west to make it a Pac-12 Conference.

Utah, you're soon going to make about 15 times the TV revenue you were getting in the Mountain West Conference. And Colorado, well, let's put it this way: Would you rather be making road trips to the Bay Area and Eugene and Seattle, or do the Stillwater-Ames-Waco swing in the Big 12?

You probably know this is quite the league you're joining. Great diversity, colorful history, more geographic chops than any other conference in the nation. We've got mountains, ocean, desert, wheat fields and Telegraph Avenue. To win the thing, you might have to play in 110 degrees in Tempe in September and 15 in Pullman two months later.

But there are things you need to know, because, well, the seller occasionally keeps secrets from the homebuyer. We're here to tell you where the bones are buried.

LOS ANGELES -- Here at the first Pac-12 football media day, the luncheon fare was build-your-own-sandwich -- turkey, roast beef, tuna -- and healthy slices of paradox. And would you like that with or without mayo?

On one hand, we had Colorado, feeling as though it's finally in the conference it should have been in all along, ready to assume the twin tasks of rebuilding a program and getting to know its new lodge brothers.

SEATTLE -- Not all NCAA basketball championship games are close. Not all are well-played. But all of them have had a strain of title-game chops -- DNA, if you will, that hinted that what you were watching was the stuff of the supreme teams in the land.

Until Monday night's finale between Connecticut and Butler. Blecch.

I've been in the building for 22 championship games, and scoured the record book searching for the long-lost ugly twin to this game. Don't bother looking; there isn't one.

The dispatch hit the wire about two months ago: Harrison Barnes, North Carolina's mega-touted freshman forward, was a first-team AP preseason basketball All-American.

On the gulf shores of Florida, and in San Francisco, and in Kansas City, the nation's biggest college athletic conferences are staging their summer meetings this week. They'll talk about scheduling and media guides and a lot of other mundane things.