Kentucky football kicked off its season opener at 10:05 p.m. ET, over two hours after its projected start time of 7:45.
Despite that, plenty of fans still packed into Kroger Field ready to watch some football and probably would have stayed far into the a.m. had the game not been called in the third quarter thanks to, shockingly, more weather.
This should come as no surprise, however, as, not only are UK fans passionate, college football fans know a thing or two about some late-night gridiron. In fact, there was a whole phrase coined for one conference’s late-night escapades.
Fans who have followed the sport for long enough are sure to have heard the phrase “Pac-12 after dark” at some point or another.
The phrase was coined for the Pac-12 conference, fittingly. The conference, which included west coast schools such as USC, UCLA, Washington, Washington State, Colorado, Arizona, Arizona State, Oregon, Oregon State, Utah, California and Stanford, along with Idaho and Montana once upon a time, was given two founding dates: 1915 and 1959.
The later one was more accurate, marking the dissolution of the Pacific Coast Conference. It underwent numerous numerical name changes until Colorado and Utah joined in 2011 to create the Pac-12: the conference of champions.
With a focus on the west coast markets, games would regularly start late into the night by eastern time standards, regularly kicking off at 11 p.m. ET or later. Not quite Hawaii levels of early, but notorious nonetheless.
With the conference being known for thrilling matchups, although not always the most technically sound, fans from all across the country would sacrifice their sleep schedules to get a glimpse of the action, or rather the action they were able to get due to the inaccessibility of the Pac-12 Network.
The action gave college football fans countless memorable moments in the sports’ history including UCLA’s shocking 67-63 comeback against Washington State in 2019, Utah’s Hail Mary win over UCLA and… UCLA’s… thrilling comeback over Texas A&M after trailing 31-3.
While the conference technically still exists with only two members, Washington State and Oregon State, both were forced into scheduling agreements with smaller conferences (Mountain West for football and West Coast Conference (WCC) for basketball) and the writing is clearly on the wall.
Unfortunately for fans, the Pac-12 as they knew it came to an official end late on a Sunday night in early June. Oregon State was the final remaining baseball team left in the conference and despite possessing the eventual No. 1 overall pick in the MLB Draft, its season came to an end in the NCAA Super Regionals.
The team it lost to? The Kentucky Wildcats.
Turning a rather sentimental reminder into a full-circle moment, it’s only fitting that the Wildcat faithful were subjected to a late night as reparations for their team’s part in the death of the conference fans once held so dear.
While that’s not entirely fair — regardless of what became of OSU’s season, its last game still would’ve ended the conference as fans knew it — and Kentucky can hardly be blamed for the death of the Pac-12, the SEC conference as a whole certainly could.
It was, in fact, the SEC’s addition of Texas and Oklahoma that sparked a national panic from power conference schools regarding TV and media deals. This panic festered and grew as the Big Ten soon poached USC and UCLA, gaining a stranglehold on the Los Angeles market.
While the Pac-12 tried to reassure its member schools, those who stagnate are destined to fail in college athletics. The schools knew what had to be done and once the first domino fell, the rest continued to topple.
Oregon and Washington joined their former conference members in the Big Ten, Arizona State, Arizona, Utah and Colorado jumped ship to the Big 12 and Stanford and Cal accepted an invitation into the ACC. This left Oregon State and Washington State as the odd ones out and forever killed the Pac-12 as fans knew it.
While late night games aren’t going anywhere — west coast schools still need their primary demographic — the thrill of late-night Pac-12 games have unfortunately gone the way of the thrills of the original Big East or the Metro Conference.
College football is an ever growing and changing organism with new teams joining the fold of the FBS every year and conference realignment happening every offseason, but the memories of what was will remain forever in the hearts and minds of those who witnessed them.
Perhaps on a stormy night in Lexington, Kentucky, those memories of the conference of champions were enough to bring a smile to the face of fans across the country and a feeling of nostalgia to fans in attendance that had the fortune of making a trip out west.
