Pac-12's 'next man in' not good enough

Maybe nobody will look closely at the Pac-12's bowl record. Maybe they'll see "6-4," deem it a decent runner-up tally to the once-again bee's knees SEC and move on. Maybe they won't realize there's only one quality win against a ranked Power 5 team. Maybe they won't see the Pac-12 as Stanford and everybody else.

Funny thing is, if Saturday had gone according to expectations -- and with Oregon leading TCU 31-zip at halftime, it was cruising along swimmingly -- the Pac-12 could have felt good about itself. But the distance between 8-2, which would have tied the SEC, and 6-4 is the distance between the conference's season feeling like the success it might have been vs. the failure it was.

First…