Burbank, Ca – The Pac-12 the Conference of Champions will celebrate 100 years on its Birthday December 2nd, 2015. Commissioner Larry Scott said, “As much as it is a time to celebrate, anniversaries like this are a great time to hit the pause button and reflect, both on where we’ve been and on where we’re going.” For this special year the Pac 12 ascended on Warner Brothers Studio with the top NCAA Coaches and players. These two spectacular days will be filled info excitement and anticipation of a great season ahead.
The first day opened with Commissioner Scott addressing the media with opening statements. Followed by the first slate of coaches and players from Arizona State, Oregon State, Ucla, Washington, Stanford, and Colorado. Each coach had the opportunity to reward two deserving student athletes to embark on media day and have the privilege to represent their college for the world to see. The day was field with radio spots, hot seats on podium, putting contest, twitter photo blast, photo shoots just list some of the activities.
Ucla Head Coach Jim Mora knew the one dying question all of us wanted to know the answer to, ‘Who will be the starting QB for this season, savoy well loved Jerry Neuheisel or the rookie Josh Rosen….’ Mora’s respond was, “I think the thing that gives me some measure of comfort is knowing that we’ve got a pretty veteran group around that player, whomever it may be. We’ve got an experienced offensive line. We return the Pac‑12’s leading rusher in Paul Perkins as well as some other really good backs.
We’ve got an experienced and pretty talented receiving core, though may not with the marquis name. So it’s very unlike Brett’s situation three years ago, where Brett had to step in and do a lot. Whoever has taken snaps from Jake can depend on those around him a little bit more than maybe Brett was able to do. So that gives me a little comfort.” We spoke to three year starting center Jake Brendel about how does feel being the real quarterback this year. He let us know that he just glad to have healthy offensive line along side himself. Brendel said, “We will be in great hands with either Jerry or Josh behind me.”.
Arizona State Head Coach Todd Graham was asked, what do you need to do to be competitive? Graham respond, “Number one thing that we’ve worked on is with our‑‑ obviously, we talk about being one of the most explosive teams in the country. Third in TFLs in the nation in three years. Second in quarterback sacks. Second in interceptions. It’s a big play. Obviously, we’re in attack defense, and minimizing risk and those type of things are things we’ve really researched and worked hard on.”
In his first year as head coach Oregon State Gary Anderson was all smiles for his first Pac 12 Media day. A big question for the program is when and how will OSU compete? Anderson said, “For us, we’re really a day‑by‑day working team right now. We are so youthful. We have to worry about today and then take on the fights for tomorrow and find a way to be consistent.”
Each player and coach during day one represented the Pac-12 as champions. Its always refreshing to see true student athletes living out the dreams and showing how great and special this conference really is. The rest of the country has been able to see more and more Pac-12 games due to TV deals, and Pac 12 Network lessening the east coast biases, just due to lack of see our great conference play. This year we have 6 teams ranked in the Top 25 preseason poll. Look out even more can been seen with new Directv acquisition to bring games to even more households in the future.
