How Sweet It Is For Pacific-10 Men’s Basketball

A cab driver first broached the idea, while driving several Stanford players to dinner Saturday night.

“What do you guys think about an all-Pac-10 Final Four?” he asked.

It is morning in the Pac-10 Conference. Twenty-five percent of the remaining NCAA men’s tournament brackets are occupied by Pac-10 teams.

The conference that television neglects; the conference that is overshadowed by the Big Ten, Big 12, Atlantic 10, ACC, SEC and WAC, is dominating this year’s men’s basketball tournament.

The Pac-10 is 8-1 after the opening weekend. California is alive in the East; UCLA in the Midwest; Arizona in the Southeast; and, after Sunday’s stunning 72-66 victory over Wake Forest, Stanford remains in the West.

Sweet 16? The Pac-10 is in sugar shock.

In the ‘80s, the Pac-10 had a total of four teams make it into the tournament’s second week. Now it has four in one year. No longer can the conference be called UCLA and the nine dwarfs.

“The Pac-10 has come a long way, but we’re not done yet,” said guard Brevin Knight, Stanford’s quicksilver messenger. “Our goal is to get four teams in the Final Four and make it an all-Pac-10 Final Four.

“Everybody wants to down the Pac-10 and say we don’t have the teams; that we can’t win the big games. This just goes to show we can win the big games.”

Knight played as if he never doubted Stanford’s chances. He ran the offense with cool, computerized efficiency. He had 19 points, five assists and only one turnover. The definition of security? Having the ball in Knight’s hands in the final minutes of your most important game.

“It seems unreal. This is like being in heaven,” said Knight, a senior. “We’ve talked about getting to the Sweet 16, but it seemed like it was so far away.”

Stanford. UCLA. California. Arizona. This weekend was the boost the conference needed. These wins should alert the networks.

This is the conference the country forgets. The Pac-10 isn’t part of Big Monday or Super Tuesday. Even in Seattle, Wake Forest was on television twice as often this season as Washington.

The Pac-10 is punished for its time zone. Games start too late for East Coast papers and pollsters. They are played after TV’s prime time. The conference is the victim of demographics and geography.

“The East Coast will always get the media,” said Knight, who is from South Orange, N.J. “We know that. We have to deal with it. But we have to go out and do what we’ve been doing. Just go out and play our style and just win games.”

Why don’t the Pac-10 marketing brains work with ESPN and find a slot at, say, 6 p.m. Pacific time, on Monday or Thursday? The conference is too good to be ignored.

“It’s definitely something we talk about,” said Stanford’s Peter Sauer, a Pittsburgh native. “You have ACC, Big East, Big Ten basketball on every night. I mean, every time you turn on ESPN it’s the East Coast schools playing. That does kind of frustrate us.

“I think it would be great for our conference to work out something with ESPN. Obviously we’ve proved we have talented teams that deserve to be on television.”

Is there anyone left back East to argue the point?